


To the Pure

by K_dAzrael



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Blasphemy, Blood and Injury, Branding, Dubious Consent, Group Sex, Mentions of sex work, Multi, Orgy, Recreational Drug Use, Ritual Sex, Speciesism, Voyeurism, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-07
Updated: 2016-05-01
Packaged: 2018-05-31 19:58:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6485509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/K_dAzrael/pseuds/K_dAzrael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dear sir or madam, I am General Hux of the Resurgent-class Star Destroyer <i>Finalizer</i>. I was recently strong-armed by a colleague into joining an order of mystic knight-warriors and now they want me take part in their team-building orgies. Please advise.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [To the Pure](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13335528) by [Tersie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tersie/pseuds/Tersie)



> 'To the pure, all things are pure.' Titus 1:15
> 
> The result of a nsfw headcanon thread that got [waaay](http://cockslutkylo.tumblr.com/post/141568405706/im-100-sure-hux-has-full-access-to-the-cameras-in), [waaay](http://kdazrael.tumblr.com/post/141669903252/not-even-gonna-anon-because-%E3%83%84-so-i-have) out of control on tumblr. I'd like to thank [reserve](http://www.reserve.tumblr.com), [llyn](http://www.nightsofllyn.tumblr.com) and [kylostahp](http://www.kylostahp.tumblr.com) for enabling and listening to my late-night chat filth.

It started as concern, really. Not for Ren’s personal wellbeing – for all Hux cared, that brooding idiot could set himself on fire or take a long walk out an airlock. No, it was concern for what exactly Ren was up to – if it was something that might endanger Hux’s mission, crew, or the smooth day-to-day running of the _Finalizer_.

Comm messages went unanswered and dispatching messengers to Ren’s quarters yielded no more intelligence than that the doors were locked and none of the override codes worked. The last written communication from Ren had been maddeningly cryptic: _undertaking order communion rites. ETC: 48 hours_.

What the hell were ‘communion rites’ when they were at home? Were Ren and his creepy minions sitting around watching holodramas and eating snack foods?

Hux considered it far beneath him to snoop, but really Ren had given him no choice. Given the possibly classified nature of Ren’s activities, Hux chose to remotely access the security feed from the databanks in his private office. It took him a few minutes of flipping between cameras before he was able to locate Ren’s position within the large suite of rooms given over to his use. His behaviour immediately struck Hux as odd: for one thing, he was naked. And well, wouldn’t that settle a few bets in the officer’s mess? Namely, that Kylo Ren was indeed ‘shredded’, as an excitable young lieutenant had put it.

Hux could have shut off the feed right then and there: after all, it was clear Ren was alive and well, not trashing equipment or choking the life out of anyone. Yet he hesitated, because Ren was acting very oddly. He was arranging a series of bottles and jars and other small objects in a circular pattern upon the floor. When everything was apparently to his satisfaction, Ren kneeled down in the centre of the circle and pulled a cup towards himself. The resolution on the camera was just good enough for Hux to pick up steam rising from the mouth of it. Ren gulped down the contents, head thrown back and long throat working. When he lowered the cup, Hux could see his shoulders convulse in a cough, a hand clamped over his mouth as if to prevent the liquid making a reappearance.

When Ren had recovered from the unpleasantness of his strange infusion, he set the cup back down and pulled a jar towards himself, unscrewing the lid before laying it aside. Hux watched with a mix of astonishment and fascination as Ren proceeded to anoint his skin with an unguent, his movements all taking on a solemn, choreographed formality. His supple, muscular body took on a high sheen as he worked, not neglecting even the folds of ears or the spaces between his fingers and toes.

The next object he selected was a tall, twisted bottle of some rigid, translucent material. Ren agitated it gently from side to side and then pulled out a stopper. This he touched to the skin behind his right ear, dragging it down in a glistening arc to his suprasternal notch, and then back up in a curve to behind his left ear. After re-wetting the stopper, he then touched it to his wrists and dabbed it behind his knees.

Following this, Ren took up a burnished metal dish full of greyish powder and added a glug from the bottle of what Hux took to be perfumed oil. He stirred up the resultant paste with a pale shard of what looked like either wood or bone and used the sharp tip to inscribe himself with a series of symbols: one on his forehead; the uppermost surface of each hand and each foot; one on each pectoral; and finally, one on his stomach, between his navel and the thatch of his dark pubic hair. These symbols were unfamiliar to Hux and were certainly not that of any common alphabet or writing system.

Next, Ren set the dish on a stand and touched his fingertip to its surface.  A blue spark shot out and the mixture caught light, the flame burning intensely orange and then red. As the blaze guttered it began to send up thin spirals of smoke. Ren closed his eyes and pulled the vapours towards himself with a cupping motion of his hands, swirling it around his body in a Force-augmented vortex.

The preparations apparently complete, Ren removed each item back to wherever it was stored. He then returned to the floor of his living area and knelt again, bowing his head and closing his eyes, hands laid flat on his thighs. He sat very still in what Hux assumed was a meditation pose. After ten minutes ticked by and Ren did not open his eyes again or alter his position, Hux turned off the feed and finished up the day’s reports.

It was upon returning to his own rooms for his allotted rest cycle that Hux’s curiosity got the better of him. After returning from his nightly ablutions, and having exchanged his uniform for a loose pair of pyjama bottoms, he glanced over at his own private console. His obedient brain quickly summoned up several rationalisations for checking in on Ren and the next thing he knew, he was sliding into the chair, tapping through camera views. When he found Ren’s room again it took his brain a moment to interpret the images he was seeing. “Kriffing hell!” he hissed, accidentally minimising the window and then scrabbling to bring it back up.

Because that was Ren, up on his knees with his forehead pressed against the floor mat, working his fingers deep into his ass. Hux felt his mouth go dry and his chest tighten. This was not something he should be seeing, and yet it was so inexplicable that he found himself powerless to do anything but stare. He could see how very shiny and slippery Ren’s fingers were as they pushed and twisted. Whatever he was using as lubricant had a high viscosity and had been applied so copiously that it was dripping down his inner thighs, which trembled visibly.

Hux rubbed his hand over his mouth and reached out with an index finger to close off the feed. As the screen went black he let out a shaky breath he had not even realised he was holding. Ren was… either absolutely deranged or just the most arrogant, irresponsible creature in the galaxy. He had taken two days off to lie around in his room giving himself bizarre make-overs and masturbating.

Hux climbed into bed and tried to think of what to do. He could not sanction this kind of dereliction of duty, even if Ren wasn’t technically under his command. Yet neither could he reprimand Ren for it because there was no way he could have gotten this knowledge except by espionage.

His cock, traitorous creature, was stirring against his inseam. His mind kept flashing up those indelible images of Ren’s fingers working into his stretched, shining hole. Hux thought it was three of them, so he must have been at it for a while—

“No,” he said out loud, dismissing the image like yanking on the leash of an ill-behaved dog. _Forget you saw any of this. It wasn’t for your eyes. Ren’s mystical self-abuse is not your problem. Ren is not your problem._

He tossed and turned for twenty minutes, then kicked off the covers and went to the console again, not even pausing long enough to come up with a rationalisation. Ren was kneeling again, his body upright. His hair was damp around the edges and curling against his neck. His arms were lifted and spread wide. His cock was fully erect and shining wet at the tip. His pupils were dilated, his lips moving in some kind of chant or incantation – Hux realised he was absolutely bombed out of his skull on something and that was what was causing him to sweat and tremble.

On screen, the doors to Ren’s inner chamber opened and in filed six robed and masked figures. The Knights of Ren. Neither they nor Ren himself seemed in any way surprised or discomfited by the situation. Rather, Ren smiled beatifically and tilted his head back, arms still raised as if to welcome them. They surrounded him in a circle and pulled in closer and closer, tucking arms under and over bodies until they were pressed against him in a sort of occult-looking group hug. Hux could see nothing of Ren except one of his hands where it peeked out, curled around one of the Knight’s waists. They stood in this configuration for some time, the mass of bodies swaying almost imperceptibly, and then, with no discernible signal, they once again withdrew into a wider circle. Only one knight stayed behind: the one who wore a heavy black mantle inlaid with grey, a mask that was sunken-cheeked and eerie. This knight stood in a wide-based stance behind their leader, cupping Ren’s face in their black-gloved hands. Ren’s chest heaved and he tipped his head back and smiled up at the masked face hovering above him. It looked _intimate_ in some way Hux couldn’t fathom; he double tapped to zoom-in the feed.

Another of the knights stepped forwards: the one with a mask divided into many small squares, like the buttons on a keypad, and who wore a long duster coat with a curving, asymmetrical lapel. Ren licked his lips and leaned forward, his hands slipping beneath the knight’s tunic and working at the fastenings of their trousers. He tugged these down far enough to reveal a swathe of skin with the distinctive sun-burn pink pigmentation of the Zeltrons. The knight had female sex organs and blue-black pubic hair. Ren’s hands flexed on well-muscled thighs and he bent his head, opening his mouth wide and drawing the tip of his tongue between the knight’s labia and nuzzling. The Zeltron brought their gloved hands to Ren’s face and angled it to their liking, the mask tipping back in apparent pleasure. Two other knights (the two with the horizontal cloak fastenings; one stockier and with a much-dented metallic helmet and facade, the other with a tiered mask that looked like an insect carapace) swooped in and caught the Zeltron up in their arms, helping lower them to the ground. The shift in position brought Ren’s eager mouth chasing after its target, easing him up onto his knees.

The priestly, skull-masked knight behind him sank down and took a firm grasp of Ren’s waist with one hand, the other reaching into their own robe and pulling out an erection that was more within the flesh-tone spectrum of humans. They rubbed it against Ren, dragging the head of their cock back and forth along Ren’s well-lubricated cleft. Ren looked back over his shoulder, mouth opening in what was clearly a moan as the knight began to push into him.

Hux found himself leaning forward on his chair, hands clenching the edges of the console in a death-grip. The knights would sometimes obstruct his view, then just as he was about regain his senses and turn it off in shame, a black-coated back would move aside and reveal a new, compelling vista: Ren arching his hips and fucking back against the priestly one. Many hands holding him steady, stroking his pale, quivering flesh, pulling his hair back out of his eyes and showing the flat of his tongue working against a swollen pink clit. Ren, chin wet and lips shining red, opening his mouth wide to cover a greater area then pulling back to suckle delicately. The priestly knight manipulated Ren’s body with ease, still grasping his hip to push and pull Ren along the length of their cock.

Hux had been hard off and on all night, refusing to give in to the relief of touching himself out of some bloody-minded sense of pride. His dick was now awkwardly distending the front of his pants, creating an obvious wet spot near the waistband. He curled his hand around it loosely, almost meaning just to hold it still, then hissing at the sensation, unable to resist giving it a brief squeeze.

On the screen, the Zeltron was shuddering, twitching their hips up against Ren’s mouth as he sucked. He pulled back and ran the tip of his tongue along their inner labia, chasing the pulses of the orgasm. The Zeltron pulled his face against their fabric-covered stomach for a moment, one gloved hand curled around his cheek, the other rubbing between his shoulder blades in an affectionate, vaguely condescending gesture – _good boy_. Ren’s eyelids fluttered in response; the priestly one was still fucking him roughly from behind.

The Zeltron knight rose, readjusting their uniform and moving off to the side. The priestly one sped up, fucking Ren deeper. Hux could see the way Ren’s flesh shuddered from the impacts and he could not help squeezing himself again, the touch lingering this time and undeniably more of a caress. The priestly knight’s spine arched, head snapping back. They pulled out mid-climax, translucent come painting streaks across Ren’s ass and the last drops of it pooling into the hollow at the base of his spine. Ren panted and dropped down onto his elbows, clearly somewhat overcome.

The knights then swooped in close again, gloved hands reaching out to stroke Ren’s shoulders, his trembling sides, the length of one speckled thigh. Between the encroaching bodies Hux could just make out Ren being turned over onto his back. One of the knights – the one with a flared, dome-shaped helmet and a rectangular faceplate; the one who, as Hux recalled, was usually armed to the teeth with blasters and explosives – was kneeling at Ren’s left shoulder, one hand under their tunic pulling it up and the other unbuttoning their fly. Ren extended his hand into the shadowed region between the bunched tunic and open front of the knight’s trousers and slipped his fingers into what had to be a very wet and willing channel, judging by the smoothness with which Ren’s long, thick fingers were able to enter. The knight grasped his wrist and angled his hand to get him to press his thumb against their pubic region _just so_ , rising up onto their knees to rock against it.

Hux’s view was temporarily blocked by the knight with the sectional, insectoid mask– this one, Hux recalled, was a sniper and carried a long-range blaster weapon. The knight was assisted down by the priestly one, who helped to arrange Ren’s long legs, pushing them back against his chest to expose him. Ren was an utterly compelling mess – semen leaking from his well-used hole and his dick flushed a deep red, lying up against his stomach. Hux made an involuntary groaning sound and unfastened the drawstring of his pants, finally taking his cock in a naked grip and beginning to stroke.

The sniper knight unfastened their clothing enough to draw out a thick, indigo-coloured penis. Chiss would be Hux’s guess, though he had never seen one naked before. Watching the deep blue shaft disappear into Ren’s pale body was utterly hypnotic and Hux found himself leaning forward on the edge of his chair, mouth hanging open and his breath coming in harsh pants. The very idea that Ren was so voracious, so _insatiable_ that he was compelled to debase himself with sub-humans – Hux cursed and stroked himself more roughly.

The knight having their way with Ren’s hand showed signs of having reached orgasm, bucking and shuddering, their chest heaving beneath the thick layers of grey and black. As soon as Ren slipped his fingers from between the knight’s thighs he stuck them in his mouth, moaning at the taste as he was petted and soothed. The Chiss knight was labouring over him, spine arched and taut. They pulled out for a moment to rearrange Ren more to their liking, turning him onto his side with one knee pushed up, slipping in from a downwards angle as Ren threw his head back in a silent cry.

Ren’s eyes were glazed as he tilted his head up to accommodate yet another knight – the one who wore a short hooded cloak and a visor of black vinyl and usually carried a large, edged weapon hefted over their shoulder. When this knight knelt in front of Ren’s face and parted their garments there seemed, at first, to be nothing to see. Hux leaned in closer, struggling to focus on that dark-shaded area between the sundered edges of cloth. Suddenly a tendril burst forth, swift and aggressive like a striking viper, or the snatching tongue of an amphibian – a long, wet-looking structure that was thicker towards the middle and had a distinctive arrow-shaped tip. Hux was at a loss to guess what species this was – their skin was a dark orange. Ren opened his mouth, lips already shining with the emissions of his previous partners, and ran his tongue over the tip, which seemed to be prehensile, contracting and fluttering at the attention. Ren sucked on it delicately, neck muscles straining as he tried to get it deeper, mouth distending around the bulging middle. He pulled back just as the knight climaxed powerfully – some of the semen went in his mouth, some of it streaked across his scar and caught on one dark eyebrow.

Hux worked himself furiously, eyes wide at this image: Ren letting some inhuman wretch come on his face – the same face he had bared to make paltry excuses to the Supreme Leader, had turned to sneer in defiance at Hux. Hux gritted his teeth as he came, letting out a humiliatingly animal-sounding series of grunts. Before he could think, he found himself trailing a finger through the wetness on his own bare stomach, putting it between his lips. Was this what Ren’s mouth tasted like? Ren’s slutty, alien-fucking mouth—

Something strange was happening on the screen – the orgy appeared to have come to an abrupt halt. The Knights of Ren were still kneeling on the floor, but Ren himself had risen to his feet. Hux watched in horror as Ren’s form grew and blurred out of focus as he approached the camera lens, a look of fury in his eyes as if he could somehow _see_ Hux watching him. Hux quickly shut off the feed and staggered over to his bed, cleaning himself off on the sheets and tugging his pyjama bottoms back into place, as if that was going to earn him some plausible deniability.

Hux scrambled under the covers and commanded the lights to two percent. He lay in the dark with his eyes wide open, waiting for his breathing and heart rate to return to normal. There was no way Ren could know he was being watched, Hux told himself. The Force didn’t work like that – did it? Even _if_ Ren had somehow mystically sensed he was being observed, he could not tell who was doing it. No, it was all absurd. He closed his eyes and let his post-orgasmic lassitude overtake him, drawing him off into sleep.

*~*~*

Hux woke in the low light, his face turned towards the wall. An unfamiliar scent had permeated the room – something like brackish water or the rank odour of damp wool. Underneath it there was a hint of something else – some aromatic resin, such as might be burned in a temple. Hux blinked and rubbed his eyes, then went very still as there came a strange sound – a noise he could only describe as chittering, like a chorus of insects on some jungle planet. He rolled over in alarm and let out a curse when he caught sight of six looming figures.

The Knights of Ren were gathered around him, standing shoulder to shoulder with their hands folded in front of them, as if in respectful attendance at a bedside vigil. Ren himself was nowhere to be seen in their midst, and for some reason this fact was what chilled Hux most of all – Ren at least was fully human; he had a face, and could be reasoned with, to an extent.

“Get out of my quarters!” Hux barked. He tried to sit up, but the knight with the keypad mask stretched out a hand and he felt an invisible pressure pushing him back down. “How dare you invade my privacy like this!”

There came more of the low, rasping, mandibular sound, which Hux realised, belatedly, was laughter. He could not tell if it was coming from one knight in particular, or all of them.

“ _Oooo wak_ ,” said one of them, distinctly. Hux felt invisible fingers curling into his mind and pinching out the light.

*~*~*~

Hux woke to find himself sitting slumped in a chair. His head pounded like he had drunk a week’s worth of grog ration and he had to blink his eyes for a few moments before he could focus and take stock of his surroundings. Ren’s rooms: the ones he had become so intimately familiar with through the security feed.

The knights were standing before him again, this time spread out in a semi-circle; some with their arms folded, some with heads cocked to one side. He tried to move but found his wrists secured to the arms of the chair with invisible, mind-forged binders.

“Where is your leader?” Hux demanded. “Does he know what you’re up to? Does he realise that falsely imprisoning an officer of the First Order’s fleet is an act of high treason?”

The only response he got from this line of interrogation was more derisive chittering. The knights then parted down the middle, stepping sideways to allow their leader passage. Ren was still naked, his body streaked with oil and tears and come. His hair was a wild tangle and his fiercely shining eyes, with their huge pupils, looked utterly devoid of reason. Hux swallowed thickly, beginning to be seriously concerned about his predicament.

“General,” Ren said, his voice hoarse (probably from deep-throating weird alien cocks, Hux thought, dimly). “How nice to finally see you. I know you’ve enjoyed seeing us.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Hux said, deciding to brazen it out. “Release me this instant and perhaps I won’t have you all executed without court-martial.”

Ren folded his arms over his chest and cocked his hip to one side. His dick was still hard, curving up towards his stomach and flushed aggressively dark near the tip. That had to be uncomfortable by now – Hux wondered if it was an effect of whatever strange potion it was he had imbibed, or if he was using the Force somehow. An invisible cock ring, perhaps – could they do that?

“You are mistaken about who is on trial here, Hux. My knights are gravely offended.”

Hux tried to level a cool look at him. “Do you think I give a Toydarian’s damn about the imagined slights of your perverted minions?”

“ _Imagined_? You are seriously going to sit there and tell a room of mind-readers that you weren’t spying on them? That you didn’t watch their sacred rituals with your dick in your hand?”

“Oh, but I didn’t see anything _sacred_ , Ren – I saw you getting your fill of inter-species strange. Or maybe not quite your fill,” Hux jerked his chin in the direction of Ren’s crotch. “Do you know that the officers all think you’re a sad, frustrated virgin? Imagine how surprised they’ll be when I tell them how eagerly you whore yourself, and how utterly pathetic you look doing it.”

There was a hissed intake of breath from one of the knights. Ren turned his head and nodded and Hux felt a sharp, powerful sting against his cheek, his head snapping to one side from the impact. One of Ren’s knights had actually _slapped_ him with the Force. Hux stared at them in fury, feeling a warm trickle of blood coming from the corner of his mouth.

“Idiot,” Ren said, “you know nothing of our ways, or what it is to truly serve. For your information, I _am_ a virgin. The Knights of Ren are a celibate order.”

“Ren, I literally just saw you getting filled from both ends – doesn’t seem very virginal to me.”   

“All things are pure to the pure,” said Ren with an air of wounded dignity. “We are one, consecrated to one another – to touch them is the same as touching myself.”

“Right, well that’s a delightfully mystic rationalisation, but I’m not sure it’s the kind of thing that will hold much water with the boys in the mess hall.”

Ren took a threatening step forward. “You’re not going to tell anyone what you saw here, Hux. We won’t allow it. Now, do you have anything to say in defence of your actions?”

“To your kriffing kangaroo court of freaks and weirdos? No! I object to these proceedings – you have no authority to pass judgement on me. This ship is under my sole command.”

“And when I and my knights came aboard, did you not agree to give them safe passage?”

Hux scowled. “I suppose I did.”

“You did. I was there – I remember it.”

“So?”

“Well, is it ‘safe passage’ if their privacy has been infringed, their rites desecrated?”

Hux glared sullenly, sucking on his bottom lip. His head was still throbbing and his usual rhetorical flair had deserted him.

“Well. If you don’t have any excuses to make, we’ll confer and pass judgement.” Ren stepped back and made as if to turn away.

“Wait!” Hux blurted out. Ren crossed his arms and gave him a look of impatience. “I… I apologise,” he forced out. “I shouldn’t have watched, I admit that.”

“Why did you?”

 “I don’t know, alright?” Hux rolled his eyes and sighed. “Idle curiosity, perhaps.”

“Try _harder_ , Hux. We will take your words into consideration.”

Hux looked down at his own bare toes, just visible beyond the horizon of his knees. “Because… because you were beautiful together. I had never seen anything like it.”

One of the knights made a sound, a lilting call that ended in a low, reverberating whoop. Hux wasn’t sure whether or not it was a language, or just a phatic sound of exclamation. Another made a series of clicks.

“What are they saying?”

“They pity you. They think you must be very lonely.”

Hux flushed angrily. “Well tell them to stop it. I don’t need pity, least of all from those malodorous wretches.”

“That’s just where you’re wrong. We will confer now.” Ren raised his hand, and before Hux could protest, he lapsed back into unconsciousness.

*~*~*

Hux came round more slowly he second time, groaning in discomfort and confusion. Something cold and metallic tapped against his forehead.

“Good, you’re awake.”

Hux blinked rapidly, he could make out the swimming, dark shape of someone crouching before him. Someone who smelled very strongly of sexual fluids and sacred resin – in other words, Kylo Ren.

“You are a very lucky man, general. The knights are more forgiving than I am. They have persuaded me to offer you a choice.”

“What?” Hux raised his head with difficulty. He still couldn’t see out of his left eye and a neuralgic pain pulsed down the side of his face.

“The choice is this: you can atone for your trespasses through death, or, you can join us, and be purified.”

“Join you?” Hux let out a hysterical bark of laughter. “What would I have to do with a bunch of mystic knights? I’m not a Force-user, I don’t exactly share your _aesthetic._ ”

“We meditated and we consulted the charters. In the past, certain faithful servants were allowed to come under the order’s protection. Lay members – not fully enfranchised, but bound.”

“I’m not joining your little circus of freaks, Ren.”

“Very well, then you prefer death?”

“You wouldn’t dare,” Hux hissed, baring his teeth.

“No? Tell me, Hux, what would you do, if I threatened your precious Order?”

Hux did not reply. Instead, and despite the considerable difficulty he had focussing his eyes, he attempted to level a steely glare at Ren.

“You would dispose of me in an instant if I threatened your position or plans,” Ren continued. “You’re not afraid of the Supreme Leader, you’re not afraid of anything – you are a cold, calculating, self-centred little man. And so, we think it’s time you learned to truly serve. If you refuse, then we all agree there is no hope for you and your death will be in the galaxy’s best interests.”

Hux raised his chin, swallowing back the blood that had pooled in a reservoir behind his teeth. “Do what you must. I won’t take orders from you, Ren.” 

Ren sighed, as if he thought Hux was being fractious and unreasonable. “Have I given you the impression we are a dictatorship, or that those who join us are unhappy or despised? We would cherish you, all of us. You would be one with us.”

Hux’s lip twitched upwards at one side into a bitter smile. “I am curious Ren – what is it about me that leads you to think I’d be desperate to join some kind of polyamorous cult?”

Ren pouted. “We think it would be for your own good, that’s all.”

“Does it occur to you that I already have a job – that I’m not actually free to go waltzing around at your heels in an outfit made of carpet remnants?”

“You can still hold your rank in the First Order. We will only require you to keep our secrets, and to commune.”

“Ah yes, ‘commune’, a word which here means, ‘get high as a kite and let faceless weirdos fuck me’?”

“There’s much more to the ritual than that. I’ll show you – all the stages. You’ll learn how to _perfect_ yourself, and you’ll come to enjoy it, in time.” Ren’s eyes held a sort of dark, demented promise that made something coil tight in Hux’s stomach.

The time allotted for persuasion apparently ended, Ren rose to his feet, turgid dick bobbing perilously close to Hux’s face for a moment before he stepped back and moved out of view. Hux could hear his bare feet slapping on the floor as Ren circled around behind his chair, looming and predatory. Then there came the unmistakeable sound of Ren’s lightsaber igniting and the whole room became tinged a flickering red.

“It’s a quick death, if that’s what you want,” Ren said, bringing the tip of the plasma blade to within an inch of the back of Hux’s neck. He could feel the crackle of its unstable energy darting out in licks against his skin, singeing the fine hairs at the nape of his neck. “But we hope you’ll reconsider. Well, what do you say?”

Hux struggled uselessly. “Ren, you perverted little bastard,” he hissed. “I hope the Supreme Leader flays you alive! I hope he sells you to the Hutts or flings you into a sarlacc pit!”

“I’m tired of your petty insults and playing for time. Give me an answer: do you want to die?”

“No, of course I don’t!”

“Good. Then will you join the Most Ancient Order of the Knights of Ren?”

Hux flinched as a particularly loud crackle echoed in his ear and the saber’s energy stung his skin. “Alright, fine! I’ll join your stupid order.”

“Not a very gracious acceptance, but it will do for now. Alright, stay still, this will _sting_.”

“Aghh FRAKK!” Hux yelled, straining forward as much as his invisible bonds allowed as the saber’s tip seared into the tender skin at the back of his neck.

“Shhh, control yourself and stay still. You don’t want to end up belonging to some other order, do you?”

Hux had some choice remarks to make at that, but another flourishing stroke of the saber tip took his words and jumbled them into a formless yell. The torment ended with one delicate hiss, like Ren had put out a cigarra on the back of his neck – a sadistic punctuation mark – then came the blessed sound of the weapon powering off. Hux let out all his breath in a rush, head slumping forward.

“Good,” Ren said from somewhere close to his right ear. “You’ll need to take care of that, until it heals, but don’t apply bacta right away – not unless you want me to do it over again.”

Hux opened his eyes, his vision blurry from tears and the sweat that had dripped into them. The six black figures were advancing, fanning out to surround him. Their circle tightened, arms linked about each other’s waists, and a sound filled the room: high, buzzing, like a swarm of winged insects. It reverberated at a frequency that made his teeth hurt; disorientated him to the extent that he could not tell if the sound was really external and heard, or inside his head and _felt_. The pitch rose and he felt himself start to hyperventilate. The darkness and the heat and the _smell_ of them was overwhelming.

“Don’t be afraid,” Ren said. “We accept you.”

This time when Hux passed out it was entirely of his own volition.

*~*~*

Hux woke in his berth, face down on the mattress on top of the covers. The cool, circulated air stung the back of his neck in rolling waves, reminding him that the dimly-recalled events of the night before were more than just a particularly hallucinatory dream. He stumbled into the refresher, head splitting, and tried to crane his neck to see the damage. With the aid of an angled hand mirror and the medicine cabinet he managed to get a good look at the angry, raised figure, now shiny with ichor. He recognised the sign as that which Ren had painted on his own forehead – two dynamic lines, one vertical, the other intersecting it high up at a thirty degree angle, and a dot marking where they crossed.

He opened his medicine cabinet with an angry huff and rooted around, coming up with nothing useful except a mild antiseptic cream and gauze. If he wanted a bacta patch he would have to go to med bay, where he would have some explaining to do. Then he remembered Ren’s instructions and felt his face flush and his shoulders tighten as he was hit by a fresh wave of humiliation. Ren had _branded_ him – like he was some primitive slaver’s possession. He had claimed he would do it again, too, if Hux took steps have the defacement removed.

Hux showered and then dressed his wound as best he could with the resources at his immediate disposal. To his relief, he found the gauze was not visible above the high collar of his uniform, but he could feel the burn throbbing to the beat of his pulse. There was a message from Ren waiting on his comm: _return to duty. we will contact you when you are wanted._

Hux thought about messaging Ren back a string of profanities and grandiose threats – but really, he considered, what recourse did he have? Given the damning nature of the events immediately preceding his capture by Ren’s knights, Hux could not imagine bringing the matter before the Supreme Leader. And who else was there to appeal to? It wasn’t as if the First Order had some friendly human resources department to whom he could fire off a formal complaint. _Dear sir or madam, I am General Hux of the Resurgent-class Star Destroyer Finalizer. I was recently strong-armed by a colleague into joining an order of mystic knight-warriors and now they want me take part in their team-building orgies. Please advise._

No, the best course of action was simply ignoring Ren and his self-important nonsense. Hux would go about his business and send out a work order to get the access codes to his quarters changed.

Apart from the maddening sting he experienced every time he turned his head, Hux’s day proceeded more or less as usual. Ren was nowhere to be found – probably sleeping off his comedown. There was something though – a niggle at the back of Hux’s mind, the feeling that he was not alone in his own head. Thoughts would occasionally surface that did not seem quite his own, most often when he was interacting with other officers or sending communications. A realisation would strike him that was a blur of linked concepts like _yes-good-ally-trust-loyal-save_ or _no-bad-liar_ - _doubt-betray-kill_. That was how Hux parsed the impulses, which did not come as words in Basic, but a deeper, animal understanding – a series of suggestive images accompanied by a spike of adrenaline that put him on guard, or a soothing sensation like lukewarm water trickling over his skin.

Hux did not put it all together until he was walking along a corridor that had viewports looking across the main hangar. Lieutenant Mitaka was at his side, struggling to keep up with his long strides as he read out the minutes of a meeting Hux had been unable to attend from his datapad. Hux felt a sudden intensifying of that presence that had been lurking at the back of his mind – as if a dial had been turned up – and he stopped short, Mitaka colliding with his shoulder and stumbling away in a flurry of apologies. Hux looked about himself wildly for the source of the interference and then he saw them, far across the yawning space of the hangar and one level above him. The Knights of Ren were gathered close to a viewport, also still, also staring. The priestly one had their black-gloved hand pressed to the transparisteel.

“Sir?” he heard Mitaka’s voice as if from far away. “General, are you alright?”

The harmonious chime of their thoughts was like a major chord: _void_ - _yes-lovely-ours-waiting-soon_. The hairs stood up on the back of Hux’s neck and his brand stung madly.

He heard Mitaka’s sharp intake of breath. “Sir, should those… _persons_ be at large about the ship without Kylo Ren?” More tremulously, he added: “why are they looking at us like that?”

“They’re looking at me,” Hux heard himself say. “Can’t you hear them?”

“No – how could I, at this distance?”

“I hear them.”

“Oh?” Mitaka drew the syllable through a variety of pitches.

“They’re not a hive-consciousness, you know – they’re six separate, highly-attuned minds. Seven, if you include Kylo Ren. He’s always with them, even in sleep. They can journey far, far apart – to separate ends of the galaxy, and still they are bound with an infinitely-fine thread. But the further they go, the more they yearn to close their circle and come back together. And they can always find one another, always.”

“Sir… should I comm someone? I can call for some troopers to have them removed, if they’re bothering you. Or can contact med bay, if you’re feeling… unwell?”

“Their order is thousands of years old,” Hux could feel the words unspooling from his throat, the vibration they caused against his lips. He felt very calm. “It will persist until the end of time, the final heat-death of all the stars, when the galaxy will be cold and still and silent. There will only be the Force, then, it will have gathered us all to it. We will be one. At last, we will be one.”

“Should I be taking this down? Is it intel, sir?”

“What?” Hux turned his head and glared at Mitaka’s wan face. “Lieutenant, what are you babbling about?”

“You were… talking, sir?”

“Yes, so I was.” Hux glanced back through the viewport and saw the Knights of Ren making their way sternwards, returning to their quarters, no doubt. “Read back the cost estimates for the prison colony. I don’t think they add up – one of those external contractors needs the Order’s boot up their backside.”

“Yes, sir,” Mitaka broke into a jog to keep up with Hux’s renewed strides.

*~*~*

Hux contrived to avoid being in the same room as Kylo Ren for almost a week, until they received a joint summons to attend to a meeting with the flickering monochrome image of the Supreme Leader. Ren and his knights were to be dispatched on a mission to a neighbouring star system to recover some information critical to their success, apparently, but the details were for Ren’s eyes only. Hux was to see to the provision of all and any resources Ren might request.

“You can’t still be _jealous_ ,” Ren said as they left the holoprojection chamber.

“What?” Hux said, forgetting that he was not talking to Ren. He had made Mitaka shuttle messages back and forth all week until, as a result, the lieutenant had been granted some temporary medical leave. Hux had wanted to deny this ridiculous request, of course, but Mitaka had a form signed by no less than two medics and a ship’s chaplain. Unamo, his replacement as go-between, was also starting to look distinctly peaky and haunted about the eyes. 

“That the Supreme Leader entrusts me with covert missions. You’re one of us now – our glories are your glories. It’s stupid for you to feel left out.”

“I am _not_ ,” Hux hissed, “one of you. As far as I care, you can take your creepy little cult followers and get the hell off my ship. Feel free to parasitize some other host – I hear the _Forerunner_ has some nice appointments, if you like deep-space missions.”

“Don’t be like that,” Ren said, his voice horrendously tender even through the mask’s distortion. “I wish we’d had time to commune – all of us – before this assignment, but everything will be settled when we return. I promise. You’ll still hear us – we won’t be far.”

“If you or one of your knights ever come near my quarters again, I’ll make it biologically impossible for you to ever _commune_ again. Do you understand?”

Ren sighed, static rattling through the mask. “I thought you were done being difficult about this.”

“What part of ‘frak’ and ‘off’ is hard for you to understand?”

“Look—” Hux jerked to a halt. His first thought was that Ren had grabbed his arm, but as Ren was still standing a few paces off, it had to be another Force-projection. “You can’t leave the order, not alive. You _chose_ , Hux. You have to live with that choice and accept your responsibilities.”

Hux let out a peal of laughter – it sounded faintly hysterical, but he was glad it hadn’t come out as a scream. “Kylo Ren is lecturing _me_ on responsibilities – have I walked into some parallel dimension?”

“I’m trying to make this easy for you.”

“Oh yes, you made it so _easy_ for me when you bound me to a chair and branded me like livestock. When you let your stunted, non-verbal minions broadcast their feelings and suspicions into my head.”

“You left me no choice, Hux. I didn’t create the order’s rules – we had to bend them to let you live at all. Now stop acting like an ungrateful brat and maybe we can all get on with our lives.”

“What kind of life do I have left – bound to seven lunatics, apparently obliged to satisfy their perverted whims?”

“It’s not like you think. It’s not shameful or degrading. Maybe you want it to be that, but it isn’t.”

“I _want_ it to be?” 

There came the whirr of Ren’s mask unlatching; he pulled it off and tucked it under one arm, stepping closer. Hux drew himself up to his full height and refused to be intimidated. Intimidation did not seem to be Ren’s aim, however – his eyes were wide and soulful. He lifted one hand, then thought better of it, dropping his gaze and pressing his lips together in a regretful expression. “I can’t touch you right now, not before battle. You haven’t been purified.”

“Is that what I have to do to repel you – roll around in filth? Because I will.”

“No, it’s not…” Ren sighed, his breath fanning Hux’s cheek. “It’s so hard to explain things. I’ve met service droids with more spiritual intuition than you.”    

Hux saw this as an opportunity to take advantage of Ren’s sentimental nature. “I don’t want this, Ren – not any of it. You can’t compel me to want it.”

Ren returned his gaze searchingly. After a pause he lowered his voice to an intimate murmur and replied: “I think you do, though. I feel how much you… how much you yearn, sometimes. That was what I felt – what we all felt – when you were watching us.”

Hux sighed, exasperated. “And I suppose your vague, mystical feelings are more important, more accurate than my explicitly-stated wishes?”

“We’re not going to force ourselves on you. It doesn’t work like that – you have to want it, you have to open yourself to it. You’ll feel bad if you don’t join in, though. You’ll feel… out of tune, and it won’t be pleasant.”

Hux gave him a sharp, sceptical look. “Ren I’m still not convinced that this isn’t just some absurdly baroque sexual fantasy of yours. ‘Yes, but when I fuck six people at once it’s ok because it’s _sacred_.’”

Ren raised his eyebrows in a knowing expression. “Come to us when we call and you’ll find out.”

“What do you get out of this, out of interest? Not the fucking, but me being involved.”

“What makes you think I’m getting anything out of it?”

Hux sighed, defeated. “Because I can _feel_ it, ok? That you’re sort of… pleased. _Warm_ about it.”

A muscle tightened in Ren’s jaw and he looked down. “Sometimes it’s overwhelming to be the one on the outside. The knights are more pure than I am – they’re insulated, they don’t have dealings with the outside world. I do, and it taints me. I hate that. It’s what makes me susceptible to… temptation.”

Hux narrowed his eyes, putting it together from some combination of the wordless images in his head and Ren’s hang-dog expression. “And so you want someone else on your side – a little tainted playfellow?” 

“There are things…” Ren began, then he stopped himself. “No, not yet. Later, maybe, when we return.” He took a step back, helmet still tucked under his arm, and seemed to be taking his leave.

“Well, have fun on your little secret mission,” Hux said. “I hope you all get annihilated by a stray asteroid on the way back,” he added, without much feeling.

“I’ll send you some instructions and supplies – for the first part of the ritual. The second part is more complicated, I’ll have to teach you in person.”

“This is absurd,” Hux told him. “You are absurd.”

Ren smiled, looking predatory, his eyes almost black in the low lighting. Hux’s neck prickled and he wondered if Ren was doing that with the Force.

“No,” Ren said, “that’s all you. It’s _excitement_.”

“Go away before I taint you with my fist.”

Ren laughed, tossed his ridiculous mane of hair. “I’d say that threat sounded better in your head, but it really didn’t.” He replaced his helmet and made his way down the corridor with his usual graceless stomp. “Goodbye, Hux.”

_Soon-sweet-farewell-void-longing-united_ , said the knights. Or, something like that: Hux caught an image of a flower blossoming; of waves lapping against a deserted moonlit shore; of some needle-legged insect bursting from a papery cocoon; of a dark absence among the stars where once a planet used to be. This void was their symbol for him, he had gathered, and they seemed to mean it as a compliment – the image always vibrated in his mind as a lover might tremulously say ‘darling’.

“Leave me alone,” he said, pointlessly, out loud. “I don’t want to be courted.”   

A pair of stormtroopers who had just rounded the corner turned their heads and then quickly picked up the pace.

*~*~*

At the end of his shift, Hux returned to his quarters to discover a package waiting for him on his desk. He slid the top off and glanced at the contents within, frowned and then gingerly inserted a gloved hand to investigate further, snapping it back when a section of flexible tubing threatened to tangle around his wrist like a vine snake. He picked up the lid again and pressed his thumb to the display panel on the side of the box to view the list of contents.

_Ren, what the HELL is this?_ Hux typed into his comm. He paced back and forth for a few minutes until he heard the distinctive ping of a reply.

_you can fast for 12 h. instead of taking the emetic if pref. but not sure how you are with low blood-sugar._

Hux let out a noise of frustration and disgust, then began furiously typing his reply. _Not that! Though that is also an insane thing I will not be doing. Why have you sent me an enema kit?_

_thought that would be obvious given nature of ritual._

_I’d say ‘go fuck yourself’, Ren, but I know how much you like that, you perverted little sithspit._

_afraid you’ll like it? pressure + fullness + humiliation? I don’t but feels good afterwards._

Hux stared blankly at the screen for a long moment before he typed back: _I think you actually did execute me, and this is my punishment in the afterlife._

_stop complaining. embarking shuttle now but back soon._

Hux tossed the comm device across the tabletop in disgust, where it skittered and then thumped against the box of horrors that apparently constituted ‘stage one’ of this arcane farce. He took a sonic shower, changed the gauze on his wound, and dressed for bed, lying in the dark listening to the faint hum of the engines far below. The knights were showing him white sand lit by an orange sun, the arid, barren vista suddenly overtaken by a black storm cloud, its pregnant body flashing with sheet lightning. Then water falling, hissing to the ground and throwing up mist, forming great rushing channels. Hux had not seen or heard such a downpour since he was a small child on Arkanis.

_nourish-clean-pure-patience-wash-renew_

On the brink of sleep, unguarded and lulled by the plink-pattering of imaginary rain, he finally felt as if he understood. _Yes_ , he said. _I will, yes_.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Goodness gravy, everyone. I did not anticipate what a run-away success the first chapter of this would become or how many people were out there hoping and pining away for mystical, sexy times with the Knights of Ren. Thanks to all who commented and/or poked me on the tumblr. I hope this last part is... satisfying? It's certainly long.

Hux woke before his chrono: a shock; some transmitted thought - alarm. _What?_ he asked, searching his own mind for the source of the panic. _What was that?_

He had begun to doubt that the knights could understand Basic, or even receive his thoughts in the form of words, so he rolled on to his back and tried to think in pregnant images, as they did. He found the process slow and frustrating. He did not care for allegory as a rhetorical figure – he never used it in his own speeches, it was too imprecise and open to misinterpretation. ‘Strange speaking’ was how one of his old academy textbooks had glossed it, which was fitting for the knights and their obfuscatory thought processes. They had a very _yes, and_ approach to what was true.

He closed his eyes and imagined a scene of carnage: burning buildings, scattered bodies. He wanted this to mean _emergency?_ It quickly occurred to him that to the knights it very well might not: for them it might mean something more like _fun afternoon out_.

 _no_ , one of them replied, which Hux always felt as a double flash of blackness behind his eyes. This knight was far away from the others and the scene of action, but they understood the situation. They showed him the black, rolling storm cloud. Hux thought this image meant Ren. Ren in action somewhere: his huge, tattered form only ever elegant in combat.

 _rest_ , the knight told him, showing a bird in a nest, its beak tucked beneath its wing. They could not affect his body from a distance, so it was only a suggestion.

Hux frowned as he closed his eyes, a feeling of unrest and tension giving way to a stirring of arousal as he was drowsy and warm. Hux had not touched himself since his episode of illicit voyeurism – he found the knights’ thoughts flitting around his mind too distracting and humiliatingly invasive.

He rolled over onto his stomach, sliding his arms underneath his pillow. His cock throbbed between his body and the mattress, but he closed his eyes and tried to will it away. He hated this, had always hated this – the very thought of anyone else knowing how petty his desires were, how insistent. His brain immediately conjured up a highlight reel of his teenage mortifications: there was the time his mother caught him, of course. It was when he was twelve years old, in his family’s quarters in the gap between junior and senior academy. She didn’t see anything except the tell-tale movement of his hand under the bedclothes, his tell-tale scramble onto his side, but he could see from her look of shock and then careful, wordless blankness, that she knew. She stepped back into the corridor and let the doors close behind her. They never spoke of it, but he had been possessed with a certainty that she was disgusted and disappointed in him, that he had proved himself a dirty little boy, and not the golden son that she had welcomed back with his exemplary report card and tin-tacky medals.

Back then he had thought it a private sin rather than a near-universal one. Discovering it on his own, what his body could do with the right stimulation, he had briefly imagined that he invented the act. The dormitories of the senior academy would cure him of that fanciful notion, of course. There he had felt besieged by the furtive sexuality of his peers – everywhere he went there seemed to be a reminder. He fell asleep with his hands over his ears to block out the panted breaths and rustling bedclothes of other, bolder boys. He used to stare straight ahead in the showers so he wouldn’t have to see the evidence of morning arousal, or how better-developed some of the others were than himself.

When he was fifteen he walked into a storage closet to find two older boys of the graduating class in the middle of a torrid encounter. One was almost fully dressed, only his belt and trousers undone. The other was stripped to the waist and had his uniform pants lowered: he was bent over a crate and the first boy was penetrating him. Hux had thought that perhaps the almost-naked boy was being assaulted and he called out in panic to them to ask what the hell they thought they were doing. The almost-naked youth turned his head and sneered, told him “frakk off, you little pervert.”

Hux had been overcome with anger and mortification. How dare they act as if he was the inappropriate one – he hadn’t asked to see that! Later, when he replayed the memory over and over again it would morph, becoming quietly rewritten – so Hux entered silently, so he hid behind a storage unit and could see it all, and they couldn’t see him. He would have the power, then – those stupid, older boys, debasing themselves like animals, Hux watching in lordly disdain. He wouldn’t even have to touch himself – he didn’t have to, if he didn’t want to. He could will it away – wait for weeks, if necessary, until he was somewhere really private. That was the difference between him and them.

It wasn’t until he left the academy and entered officer training that he had his first taste of the galaxy beyond – planetary leave in a grimy city whose only source of prosperity was a spaceport that serviced the Hydian Way. Hux’s barracks-mates spent credits like water, lavishing drinks upon the local bar-girls and lapping up their attention, heedless of the mercenary nature of the women’s flattery. Hux watched, disgusted and out of place, his cold gaze zeroing in on simpering smiles and wandering hands. Eventually, a woman approached him – older, apparently herself an accomplished watcher. He bought her the drink that would serve as a retainer for her company, she smoked a cigarra and spoke to him about his studies, patronizing him in a different way. Back in his hotel room she held a damp towel to his forehead, told him to put his head down and breathe – that it wasn’t uncommon, he didn’t have to be ashamed. If he liked men she could find him something more to his tastes. 

Hux told her he didn’t know what he liked, that he didn’t seem to like people at all, maybe that was the problem. He went on to say (he was drunk) that he wished everyone in the galaxy would just leave him alone, give him space, stop grunting and pawing at each other for five kriffing minutes, _then_ maybe he could work it out. Her warm hand felt like a brand on his bare shoulder, he shrugged it off.

Hux remembered the feeling of absolute relief he experienced some years later when he got his first set of fully private rooms: a bedroom with a door that locked, a refresher for his personal use only. He had proceeded to rediscover masturbation with a vengeance, drilling himself in it almost, upon waking and before sleep. He constructed detailed, elaborate fantasies that he would replay in his own head like a holo, adding or changing details as he saw fit, building up the scenario and then tearing it down to start afresh. Mostly these fantasies featured people he hated and would love to see brought down a few pegs, or people he had once admired, and who had failed, as he saw it, to return the sentiment with quite the proper cold acknowledgement of regard.

He reached his early thirties with almost nothing to show for himself in terms of actual on-the-job sexual experience: a few drunken kisses and gropes, in his much younger days; the encounter with the sex worker from the bar he supposed counted as losing his virginity, in a strictly legalistic sense. There had been penetration for a brief moment and that, in the eyes of humanity, was supposed to be a magical, life-altering event. Hux had only experienced it as another humiliation, a failure.

He had always meant to amend the error – to try again under better, more controlled circumstances. Perhaps with a co-worker, one who was similarly detached and able to keep things professional. However, opportunities thinned out with every step he took upwards in the ranks and he had never been very personable to begin with. He watched others flirt – the extended eye contact, knowing smiles, and hands on elbows – small, testing-the-waters touches. Hux could not bring himself to do any of these things, beyond the eye contact – and that seemed to be more unnerving, than anything.  

Once, at the junior academy, Hux’s class had been made to watch an old crackly holo about the origins and natural superiority of humankind. Hux had learned that primitive humans were tribal creatures. On Coruscant (or wherever it was that their species really did first climb out of the primordial ooze) they had once lived in small, co-operative groups and had been naked and tactile. The documentary must have made a deep impression on the young Hux, because he still thought of it often – the actors mugged up in wigs, prodding and gesturing at one another, their modesties preserved with strategic arrangements of synthetic fabric made to stand for animal pelt, reproducing what the narrator had termed the ‘noble simplicity’ of the first humans.

What those ancient ancestors would think of _his_ life, Hux could only guess. They would probably look at him as the advanced sentient species now viewed animals in a zoo: _it can live, I suppose, but what a life._ Sometimes as Hux dressed, building the careful layers of his uniform, he would look at his own bloodless face the mirror and think about how long it had been since anything had touched his bare skin – even sunlight.

(Of course, lately the answer to that was _two weeks ago_ and _Kylo Ren’s bloody lightsaber_.)

  _void_ , said one of the knights. Hux groaned and rolled onto his back, pressing his fingers to his closed eyes until the black vista flared with sparks and lines.

“Leave me alone,” Hux said, out loud. The knight showed him a vision – not a symbolic one this time, but a glimpse through the knight’s own eyes. He could see from the cloak they wore and the weapon they carried – the plasma blade halberd – that it was the priestly knight, the one who was often associated in Hux’s mind with a particular weird sound-image of a bell tolling across a desolate landscape. They were somewhere green and humid; somewhere with trees hung over with ragged sheets of grey moss.

They were standing before a pool of stagnant water. It was not a natural reservoir, though so overgrown that it looked like one. It was bounded with stones – a cistern of some kind. The water was green and choked up with weeds, full of dark swimming shapes and eye-like jellied clusters of amphibian spawn. The knight raised their hand and there was a feeling of strain and pressure, then a drawn-out ripping sound. A clump of moss and earth ripped off the side of the cistern, all in one piece like a plaster from a wound. The knight twitched his fingers and the clump was tossed off in the distance to land with a wet thud among the trees. Water began to trickle into the basin, then to pour, a great cataract of pure spring water bursting forth from the sluice that had lain hidden below.

“I suppose you think that’s clever,” Hux snapped. He rolled back over onto his stomach and clapped his hands over his ears – force of habit, of no use to him now.

*~*~*

Hux stood on the bridge, hands clasped behind his back and eyes unfocussed.

“Sir,” Chief Petty Officer Unamo said, turning from her console. “Kylo Ren’s command shuttle is approaching.”

“Yes, I am aware.” The inferior officer gave him a puzzled look, unable to guess how Hux, who had been staring vaguely through the prow-facing viewport for the past twenty minutes, came by information she had just that very moment received.

Hux knew because he had been able to feel it all day – a sensation like there was something elastic in his brain that had been stretched out, and it was slowly returning to its normal shape. Hux turned his head and brought his heels together smartly. “Tell med bay to ready a private treatment room and arrange an escort to meet the shuttle. One of Ren’s cohort is injured.”

“Yes, sir,” Unamo’s gaze flickered with concern for a brief second, but she turned back to her station and began typing out commands.

Hux shook off the spaced-out feeling and brought up the scouting reports for FOC-00563, a planet in the Unknown Regions which had been determined to have valuable deposits of metal ores and minerals, and thus was scheduled for assimilation into Order territory. The scouting contingent had put out a favourable report, but Hux could tell they were skating lightly over the suspicion and resistance they had encountered from the native species. He sent back a sternly-worded memo that alluded briefly to the Battle of Endor and terminated with a demand for more detailed intelligence-gathering and less wishful thinking.

Sounds of alarm from somewhere behind him drew Hux from the blue light of his datapad and he turned to see officers scattering as a group of six ragged, masked figures marched towards him, followed by a team of stormtroopers, their booted feet clanging on the floor and blasters raised.

“Halt!” their red-pauldroned officer called. “This is a restricted area. You do not have clearance! Return the way you came or we will open fire!”

One of the knights raised a contemptuous hand and knocked the nearest three troopers flying into a databank, which emitted a series of bright red sparks and promptly caught on fire.

“Opening fire in three-two—”

“Enough!” Hux shouted, projecting his voice down the length of the room. “Stand down, sergeant.”

“Sir?” said the trooper, cocking his head to one side.

“Stand down. Do not open fire on my bridge.” Hux moved down one step from where he stood at the viewing platform, clasping his hands behind his back. “You are given to understand, are you not, that the Knights of Ren are our allies?”

“Yes, sir,” the officer replied, sounding puzzled, “they are under the command of Kylo Ren. But Ren is not with them – he’s in med bay.”

“That is irrelevant. The knights are our trusted allies and under no circumstances should they be treated as hostiles. Now go, take your troops off for a refresher of Course 124b, ‘Conflict De-escalation in Non-Combat Zones’.”

“Yes sir, but what about… them?” The captain jerked his helmet towards the knights, who were now making their inexorable way towards Hux, causing everyone in their path to scatter or flatten themselves against their consoles.

“I will deal with the knights. It is me they have come to speak with.” The sergeant gave a hand signal and his troop obediently turned to march out. The bridge officers continued to stare in horror at the interlopers making their way up the central aisle. “Back to your tasks,” he snapped. “Lieutenant Fest, get that fire extinguished and tell maintenance to get up here on the double.”

Hux descended the final step and walked forward to meet the knights. “What is it?” he asked, trying, simultaneously to keep his voice low and also to make it seem authoritative, as if a conference with six dark side mystics was exactly what he had scheduled for this hour of his shift. “Are Ren’s injuries serious?”

 _void-presentation-honour-slain-assimilated-fire_ , said the knights.

“What?” Hux asked, trying to assemble these disparate concepts and images into a logical order. Their usual rank smell had been all but cancelled out by that of smoke, which seemed to hang around them like a miasma. The hem of the duster coat on the knight with the insect-like mask and sniper rifle (now better known to Hux, through their mental conferences, by their image call-sign of a dead warrior face down in a bank of snow) was still smoking faintly.

The knight strapped with blasters and explosives (now often associated with an image of shrapnel embedded in a wall) stepped forward and dug a hand into a pocket in the front of their coat. They came up with a handful of grey dust which started to spill from between their gloved fingers onto the floor until Hux hurriedly pulled off his command cap and upturned it below the stream.

“What is this?” he demanded. “What did you burn? Please tell me it wasn’t something on my ship.”

 _honour_ , repeated the hooded knight who carried a cleaver and was linked to an image of blood spiraling in a body of pale green water. They stepped forward and dug through their own pockets to add their offering to the collection. The remaining knights crowded close to Hux, not quite jostling each other but moving in an eager press, as if they thought there was nothing Hux could possibly want more than for his hat to be full of ashes. The air around them was soon full of it – Hux could feel the fine grey particles alighting on his eyelashes and see them coating the front of his formerly immaculate tunic. 

“Well,” he said when they had all offered up their donations, “thank-you for this… honour. Perhaps next time you’re moved to pay a visit you could ask me to come to you – that would be more convenient.”

 _storm-companion-seek-injured-comfort-pain_ , said the knights.

“Yes, you’d better let me do that,” Hux replied quickly. He concentrated and tried to send them an image of a door on the second deck, hoping this would mean something like _go to your quarters_.

 _soon-void-commune-cleanse-renew-farewell_ , they said, turning as one and filing off towards the door.

Hux watched them go, taking a deep, steadying breath and then letting it out slowly. He looked down at the cap still cupped in his hands and then – cautiously, so as not to upset its contents – folded it into the crook of his arm, thinking that this would look more respectable, somehow. _Nothing to see here, just an officer with a hatful of ashes of unknown provenance._

“Well?” Hux called out in reprimand to the bridge staff, who were all still staring at him in a mixture of confusion and what he fancied was suspicion. “Did one of you receive notice in the last five minutes that we have triumphed over the Resistance and brought order to the entire galaxy? No? Then get back to work!”

He made his way quickly (but not so quickly as it would seem like he was fleeing his own command station) from the bridge and headed towards the bank of turbolifts.

*~*~*

Hux followed the sounds of yelling and the crash of expensive equipment to the med bay suite that currently housed Kylo Ren. Two junior medics scrambled past him just as he reached the doorway and Hux stepped inside to see sparks coming from a lifemonitor bank and a single surgical tray still spinning on the floor. A senior medical officer in a pale grey tunic was half way up one of the walls, kicking wildly and scrabbling at his own neck. Kylo Ren was lying on an examination platform, half turned on his side as he reached up with one clenching hand. His face was chalk-white and teeth gritted, breaths sucked in and out with a concerning rasp, and his hair stuck to his face with a sweat. His black garments were severely torn at the right shoulder, revealing a gory mess of injured flesh below. Blood dripped with a slow, regular patter onto the white floor.

“That’s enough,” Hux said sternly. “Let him go.”

Ren flopped back with a groan and the officer hit the floor hard, knees crumpling beneath him.

“I…” the unfortunate medic managed to choke out after a few moments of pained gasping. “I was just…” he gestured to a syringe – no doubt of analgesic – that had rolled away onto the floor.

“Yes, well. Lord Ren is very particular about who touches him and what he takes into his body. You’d better send in a droid. I’ll attend and keep him calm.”

The medic scrambled to his feet and limped off out of the room, one hand on the wall for support.

“Since when?” Ren croaked.

“Since when what?” Hux set aside his upturned hat on an adjoining examination table and shrugged off his greatcoat, then began stripping off his gloves.

“Since when have you ever kept me calm?”

“Alright, don’t be a smart-arse – you’ve lost a lot of blood.” Hux pulled a pair of sterile gloves from a nearby dispenser. “Can you have transfusions?”

“Synthetic, not human.”

“We only carry synthetic - human spoils too quickly.” Hux went to where a blood bag already hung from a metal armature, the white tubing still swaying, and dragged it closer to the bed.

“Oh, are you going to be my nursemaid?”

“That seems to be the role I’ve been cast in, given that you’ve decided to play an unruly child.” Hux pulled up a stool and sat down, then began to pull on the gloves.

Ren unfolded his arm and turned his head to regard Hux curiously. “Do you even know what you’re doing?”

“Of course, I’m trained in field surgery. I didn’t spend my formative years hitting people with magic sticks, you know.” He picked up a small laser cutting tool designed to penetrate fabric but not skin and looked at Ren. “Regrettably, this will involve some touching.”

“It’s ok. I’m not – it doesn’t matter now.”

“Ah, already shed your holy glow, have you?”

Ren’s face crumpled into a frown and he looked at Hux almost in confusion.

Hux sighed. “Well, I’m going to have to cut you out of this… whatever it is. Crop top?”

“Doesn’t matter, doessn…” Ren mumbled, all expression slipping from his face as he passed out.

Hux cut away the ruined fabric and carefully peeled the blood-soaked remnants from Ren’s skin. Then he dumped the whole lot in a biohazard receptacle and changed his gloves. He swiped Ren’s arm with a sterilizing beam and carefully slid the needle home in the crook of his arm, nodding in satisfaction as the blood began to drain. An FX-model droid rolled into the room, waving its spindly arms in consternation, and Hux commanded it over to Ren’s right side. He rinsed off Ren’s shoulder and wondered aloud how deep the wound below went. The droid beeped and obediently performed a 3-D scan, projecting it into the air above the bed. From the level of damage, Hux could tell that it had been made by some kind of bladed weapon, not a blaster bolt. The droid would have to hold the upper layers of skin and muscle apart while the healing field fused together the lower ones. Hux was tempted to get an immediate start on this, but did not fancy the outcome if Ren were to suddenly regain consciousness halfway through the procedure.

Ren stirred just as he was removing the IV needle. He regained his faculties surprisingly quickly, moving from peering up at Hux in fuzzy confusion to watchful alertness in the space of just a few seconds. “Hux,” he said hoarsely.

“Alright,” Hux said in what he hoped was a brisk but reassuring tone. “Don’t move. We still need to take care of that shoulder. It’s going to be painful and you will have to stay very still.”

“I can take pain.”

“Yes, yes.” Hux finished taping a pressure pad to Ren’s inner elbow, then stripped off his gloves. “I’ll make sure you get a sticker that says ‘I was a big, brave dark-sider at the doctor’s today.’” Looking over at the droid, Hux said “go ahead.”

The droid beeped dubiously.

“Go on.”

It gave a low whirr and more beeps.

“I know he’s not sedated. He’s aware of what you’re going to do, he won’t attack you.”

Ren’s body went very tense and the droid rolled closer to him, bringing up one of its spidery arms and focusing a manipulator beam on Ren’s shoulder. The wound opened up like a flower and Ren shuddered and made a horrible choked-back sound of agony. Across the room something creaked and then crumpled in on itself.

“Alright Ren,” Hux told him, thinking back to rule one of his combat medical training: keep them calm, keep them conscious, “you’re doing well. Stay with me.”

He leaned over Ren, laying his arm across the other man’s chest and exerting a light pressure, cupping his scarred cheek and turning his head to the side, away from the working droid. Ren’s left hand came up and gripped Hux’s arm painfully through his uniform jacket. “That’s good,” Hux told him. “Nearly finished now. Just another few seconds.”

He could feel the raised moles on Ren’s cheek, the absurd softness of the skin below them. Something wet trickled against the pad of his thumb – Ren’s tears, sliding down into the valley between his first two digits, pooling in the hollow of his purlicue. “It’s alright. All be over soon.”

Even as Hux felt a deep-seated anxiety about the procedure being finished before Ren could snap and cause more carnage, there was something intoxicating about the proximity to the other man, feeling all that power and tumult pinned beneath him. He looked at the curve of Ren’s cheek and the bridge of his nose, eyes tracing the scar to where it disappeared over his brow. That shuddering, deathly pale face had been so flushed and full of life just days ago. It had been covered in the offerings of his knights and now Hux was touching it – he should have felt revulsion, but he did not. He leaned down closer and breathed in, wondering if he could still smell it on him though that was a ridiculous thought, Ren must have had a number of showers since then. He smelled of smoke and the stale sweat of a violent exertion.

The droid beeped to announce the completion of its task and hurriedly reversed back out of the room, apparently eager to put some distance between itself and the barely restrained master of the dark side.

Hux leaned back to inspect the droid’s work, leaving his hand pressed against Ren’s cheek to keep him still another moment. “It doesn’t look so bad, but you ought to take better care of your saber arm. Fold each finger in for me.” He watched as Ren complied with the instruction. “Out again. Ok, now make a fist. Good. Any numbness or weakness?”

Ren swallowed and there came the sound of a slow, juddering inhale. Hux felt another hot tear trickling down the side of his thumb.

“I’ll uh… leave you to get your strength back, shall I?” Hux went to pull his hand from Ren’s cheek but Ren placed his own over it to hold it in place.

“Don’t let go.” Hux watched in a sort of abstract horror as Ren’s lips trembled and his eyes closed, blinking out more tears. “I thought I could be free of it. I still feel his hand right here sometimes, like a brand.” Ren opened his eyes again; in the bright light of the med bay they were a pale brown shot through with green. He turned his face, rubbing his cheek against Hux’s palm. “I’m so weak, Hux.”

“Well,” said Hux awkwardly. “You have lost a lot of blood.”

 _loss-pain-pull-father-failure-need_ , said the knights, apparently feeling it necessary to coach Hux on Ren’s ongoing existential crisis.

“They don’t understand. They’re so complete, in themselves, in their knowledge of what will be—” Ren’s face crumpled and he began to sob, harsh breaths causing his lips to part. They were very full, Ren’s lips, and an absurd baby pink.

Hux began to wish he knew the Knights’ trick of projecting their minds, if only so he could be anywhere but in the here and now, dealing with this. “They’re… they’re very fond of you Ren.”

Ren rolled over onto his side, taking Hux’s hand with him, pressing it between his increasingly damp cheek and the mattress. Hux had to lean over at an awkward angle, essentially draping himself over Ren’s naked, shuddering torso. Ren’s sobs were so loud and all-consuming Hux was faintly in awe of him: he could not remember a time he himself had cried, let alone with such unrestrained gusto. Clearly, this was what came of a permissive new republican upbringing. The outburst did not seem to be staunching itself, Ren’s face – what Hux could see of it – was knotted and purple. He was going to do himself another injury with this excessive display.

“Ren,” Hux said, in what he hoped was a firm but reassuring tone. “Come on, Ren, that’s enough now. Your mission was a success, there’s nothing to be upset about.”

Ren was trying to say something but it took him a few tries to get it through his grief-tightened throat. “It’s never… never enough.”

 _Stars give me strength_ , Hux thought, taking a deep, fortifying breath. “Look, I’m not really equipped for this,” he said, out loud to the knights and, unavoidably, to Ren.

He saw a man kneeling; a dead stormtrooper, face down in a mire; a red insect bearing aloft a leaf; water running through a neatly-cut channel; a luggabeast trudging stolidly beneath its burden; an edged weapon hanging in a cradle. The tone of what the knights were saying differed – declarative, imperative, exclamative – but it was only one message, and all of it meant _serve_.

Ren finally let go of his hand and Hux extracted it slowly, as if he was afraid it was a trick and would be immediately snatched back. Ren curled more tightly into himself and Hux sat for a long moment just staring quizzically at Ren’s long, scarred back. He had no idea what to say: was he supposed to lie to Ren and say “no, you are an exemplary servant of the First Order and all your tactical decisions are excellent?” Or just… comfort him, somehow? Perhaps with platitudes and vague assurances – “Buck up, flyboy, it’s not as bad as all that! Tomorrow is a fresh new cycle!”

“Stop looking at me like that,” Ren said sulkily, still turned away.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m a bomb you don’t know how to diffuse.”

“How should I look at you, Ren?”

Ren rolled onto his back – his face was a mess. He sniffed and blinked his clumped-together lashes. “I don’t know. Like a human being?” His martyred expression was interrupted by a strange jerk and widening of his eyes, a comical, high-pitched sound escaping from his mouth.

“Now look,” Hux said smugly, “you’ve given yourself the hiccups with all that drama.”

“Shut—” here Ren’s diaphragm gave another involuntary jerk, “up!”

Hux got up and went to the table to snatch back Ren’s coarse, raggedy cloak. He returned to his seat at Ren’s bedside and held it out to him, but the other man made no move to take it. Hux folded a corner of it over a few times and then reached out to clean off Ren’s face, swiping roughly over his tear-stained cheeks and the space between his nose and mouth. Ren just lay back and let it happen – a faintly aggravated expression on his face like a child enduring yet another of its mother’s vigorous rubbings with a spit-moistened handkerchief. Hux dropped the wretched garment onto Ren’s chest and pushed back the scraggly lock of dark hair that had fallen across his brow.  

“Well,” he said, “haven’t we both had a full and exciting day?”

“Why?” Ren asked before hiccupping again. “What happened to you?”

“Oh, lots of things. I’m sure you’re not interested. Your knights came to pay me a visit on the bridge.” He pointed towards the upturned hat full of ashes. “They brought me a present.”

Ren raised himself on his elbow to look over. “Hux, did you bring a biohazard into an operating room?”

“Oh, so they are _human_ remains?”

“What else would they be? They’re hardly going to bring you a bit of charred bantha.”

“Why would they bring me remains of any kind? I know I’m not very good at thinking in pictures, but I’m reasonably sure nothing I’ve said to them so far could be construed as ‘burn people and bring me what’s left.’”

“It’s for the ritual.”

“Oh, mother of moons. This gets better and better.”

“We talked about it. Well—” another hiccup, “not _talked_ , but you know what I mean. At first they wanted to go to where the Hosnian system used to be and get you a lump of debris, but then they thought it should be something more personal to them.”

“Personal?”

“The way we think – you can’t bring anything with you into the order when you become a knight. Not even your name. Anything – what little you have by way of individuality… it’s linked to your deeds.”

“Are you saying they view the corpses of their enemies as an appropriate way to convey affection and esteem?” 

“They’re giving you their deeds – it’s a big deal. I hope you thanked them.”

“I did stop a division of troopers from opening fire on them.”

“That’s something,” Ren put his right arm behind his head and flexed his toes. With the redness in his face and neck he looked almost post-coital. Hux felt his shoulders stiffen and draw back at that thought. Ren looked up and smiled slowly. “You should schedule some time off in the next few days – the ritual takes time and can’t be interrupted.”

“Oh yes Ren, because that’s a thing I, as a general in charge of a sizeable portion of the First Order’s military resources, can simply do. ‘Well, see you lads, I’m off for some hardcore party and play with a group of homicidal cultists. Try not to crash into anything or lose to the Resistance while I’m gone.’”

Ren lifted his shoulder in a shrug. “It’s not like you’re irreplaceable.”

“Ren, I am the commander of this Star Destroyer!”

“Yeah, and you’re part of a _chain of command_. There’s some other guy with a prissy haircut and a stick up his ass right under you.”

Hux felt his eye twitch but decided not to give Ren the satisfaction of rising to the insult, or the implicit threat. “So what, I’m supposed to take sick leave?”

“Maybe. Or you could invent a mission. It’s easy – just open a file and give it a code-name, designate it with the highest security rating. Schedule a shuttle to be launched and tell people you’re on it.”

“The alarming, frankly incriminating, speed with which you came up with this plan aside, what do you imagine would happen next? Somehow the pilots just don’t realise I’m not on the shuttle? How stupid do you think my men are?”

Ren rolled his eyes as if appalled at Hux’s failure of imagination. “We’ll manipulate their memories.”

“And what if one of the officers should notify the Supreme Leader of my absence?”

Ren gave a slight shrug of his newly-healed shoulder. “The Supreme Leader is the one who advised me to join the Knights of Ren. He doesn’t share their philosophy, but he understands it.”

“Kriffing hell, Ren! What age were you when you were inducted into the sacred mysteries of group sex?”

“I don’t know – nineteen,” the next hiccup made him furrow his brows in an attempt to reclaim some dignity, “twenty maybe? I wasn’t a kid. Besides, there was an apprenticeship.”

“I’m sure it was horrifying.”

“At least I’m not all messed up about intimacy.”

“ _Intimacy_ ,” Hux repeated back scornfully, “is that what you call it?”

Ren smiled. “Look, even the _word_ makes you blush.”

“I should have let you exsanguinate, you ungrateful wretch.” Hux rose to his feet and gathered up his greatcoat.

“Don’t forget your gift.”

Hux scowled and gathered the hat up carefully into the crook of his arm. “What am I even supposed to do with these?”

“Find a proper container, for a start – metal, plasteel. Nothing porous.”

“Oh yes, nothing worse than improper storage of the ashes of one’s enemies.”

Hux exited the room to the sound of Ren’s low, rasping laughter. It seemed to be the pattern of their interactions: Ren did something to debase himself, but somehow Hux always came out feeling like the humiliated one.

*~*~*

Hux woke with a start to the sound of an alarm – no, not an alarm, a bell. A deep, regular sound that seemed urgent and yet calming. Like a prerecorded emergency message: _please proceed to the nearest exit_.

“It’s time?” he asked the empty room. A few seconds later, his comm pinged.

_yes, idiot. come to my quarters when you finish the first part. do it properly or I’ll know._

_Get fucked, Ren,_ he typed back.

_stop pretending you’re not going through with it. your self-delusions are pointless + giving us all a headache._

Hux tossed the comm onto the bed in childish annoyance. He lay in the dark, heart pounding, for a long moment of indecision, then cursed and threw back the covers.

_*~*~*_

Ren opened the doors to his quarters wearing a loosely-belted black robe of some soft-looking material. He grinned at Hux, who pushed past him into the room.

“You’d better have dealt with those officers and pilots.” Hux pivoted to face him, folding his arms across his chest.

“Very weak-minded, they accepted the fabrication without resistance.”

“Well, good,” Hux replied mildly, eyes darting around the space. Ren’s rooms were very sparse and angular. He probably had a mystical explanation for all that, but Hux did not care to hear it.

“I sensed you beginning the ritual,” Ren continued, “a little clumsy, but you have the right resonance now – light, empty.” He made a sweeping gesture with his fingers.

“It was deeply traumatizing and I don’t ever want to think about it again.”

“It’s easier if you imagine—”

“No,” Hux cut across him quite sharply. “I do not wish to _imagine_ anything. Now shall we get on with it?” He held out the small container of ashes he had brought from what he supposed now constituted a ‘store’ in his own quarters.

Ren leaned his shoulder against the door and smirked. “Someone’s eager.”

“I just want to get it over with, if it means you’ll stop banging on about it.”

Ren took the container from him and pointed to one of the doorways. “Go through and take off your uniform – you can leave it on my bed. Then you can join me in the refresher.”

“Oh I can, can I?”

Ren raised his eyebrows and looked at Hux as if he was being unreasonable. “You’re the one who said to get on with it.”

It had been a long time since anyone but the Supreme Leader (a distant, inhuman figure) had given Hux orders. He bristled at it, but Ren was still giving him a smug, amused look and Hux was damned if he was going to give him the satisfaction of seeing his frustration.

Ren’s bedroom was darker and smaller than the outer room but had much the same aesthetic. The bed was neatly made, which made Hux wonder if Ren had a droid to pick up after him. It was hard to imagine Ren doing anything careful or neat – then again, Hux had already borne witness to his methodical patience under certain very specific circumstances.

Hux undressed and carefully folded his uniform. He debated for a long moment over his underwear and then decided Ren would probably mock him for retaining them. When he exited the room, the sound of running water drew him towards the refresher. Ren was naked, crouched down by a sunken black-tiled tub and adding something from a jar to the water. It smelled floral, a powerful scent that Hux had only ever smelled traces of as base notes in perfume. Ren swirled his hand through the steaming water and then stood up.

“Go ahead.”

“I had a shower, you know – I’m clean.”

“It’s not about hygiene.”

Hux sighed and crouched down, seating himself on the edge of the pool before dipping in a foot.

“It’s hot!”

“Of course it is. Hurry up already.”

Hux slid into the water and made an undignified squawking sound when Ren slipped in behind him, the water level rising considerably.

“What are you doing?” Hux scrabbled against the slippery sides of the tub, trying to turn himself around so he was facing Ren rather than being encircled from behind in what felt worryingly like an embrace.

“This will go a lot faster if I don’t have to do all the elements twice over,” said Ren in a reasonable tone Hux suspected was affected. “It’ll also be faster if you stop fighting me every step of the way.”

There was a squeaking sound as Hux manoeuvred his legs to hook over Ren’s, knees sticking up out of the water. He wasn’t convinced that this was really any better or less intimate.

“Here,” Ren reached for him with one hand. “Lean forward. Close your eyes.”

“Ren—”

“Look, you’ve already made your choice to come here. I don’t have time for your ego – do as I say.”

Chastened and a little bit shocked by Ren’s sternness, Hux leaned forward, Ren’s hand coming up to cup the back of his neck. With his free hand Ren then reached over to the niche that held all his mysterious bathing accoutrements and lifted up a large, disc-shaped shell. This he used to scoop up bathwater and pour it over Hux’s head. Hux flinched and made a hissing sound, scrunching his eyes closed, but Ren’s hand kept him in place like a clamp.

The sacred-dumping-of-water stage seemed to take a long time. Hux’s muscles twitched at the trickles of water running off his shoulders and down his back. His sodden hair had fallen over his eyes, so he could not open them even if he wanted to.

“Are you ok?” Ren asked. Then, more improbably: “do you like it?”

Hux shook his head slowly. “I don’t, no. I haven’t been wet through like this since I was a child.”

“On the rainy planet you dream about.”

“You’ve seen that? It was called Arkanis.”

Ren made a humming sound of consideration. “You ran off from the compound and got in trouble. You were a very little child, but determined, even then.”

“Yes. I was soaked and shivering when my mother found me. She was frantic.”

“She put you in a hot bath.” Ren pushed the sodden hair back off Hux’s face with the blunt side of his hand – a little roughly, though that didn’t seem to be his intention. “It’s the last time you remember her touching you.”

“Is this part of the ritual – amateur psychotherapy?”

“Not the ritual, no. But it’s useful.”

“Useful?”

“You understand water – a lot of humans don’t. It already means _mother_ to you.”

Hux made a scoffing face at this but before he could make a remark, Ren continued: “Water and earth are wet and cold, that’s feminine. Fire and air are hot and dry, that’s masculine. The ritual combines them, it’s a kind of spiritual marriage. To make everything whole and complete, you see?”

“Why the hell should wetness and coldness be _feminine_? What do ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ even mean across thousands of years and cultures?”

“Whatever you want them to mean. Even species with no gender usually have a binary of some kind in their culture that they can relate to. It’s like the way the knights communicate – the image doesn’t matter so much as the intention. The image is a vessel for an idea.”

“This is a farrago of nonsense, Ren. You can make me go through the tedious arcane motions, but you can’t make me suspend all rational thought.”

“Fine, you don’t have to like it. I’m just telling you.” Ren pushed the shell at him and bowed his head. “Do me now.”

“I suppose,” Hux continued, dumping water over Ren’s head more vigorously than was necessary, “that next you’re going to tell me all the various significances of this shell. The orange exterior represents a sun and the white interior represents a moon, the corrugations are the life-giving furrows of a fertile land.”

“No,” Ren gazed down at the object, taking hold of Hux’s wrist to turn it back and forth. “I found it on a planet where I was deployed. It’s a nice shape.”

Hux began to laugh, a soft, hysterical sound that made him feel lightheaded. “A nice shape.”

Ren sat back, carding his hair back off his brow. His ears stuck out more noticeably through the dripping strands. Hux turned the shell over, still looking at it in a faintly wondering way.

“Orange and white,” Ren continued, resting his hand on Hux’s freckled knee. “Pretty colours.”

“Frakk off,” Hux gave a little kick, sending a shower of water over Ren, who grabbed his ankle to make him stop and then tugged so Hux almost lost his balance, dropping the shell and sliding down further into the water.

“You have pretty feet, too,” Ren said, trailing the backs of his fingers over Hux’s sole. “High arches, for agility.” Hux twisted and squawked again until Ren let him go.

“So on top of everything, you’re a foot fetishist?”

“No, I don’t have any fetishes.”

“Right, because there’s nothing kinky about drug-fuelled group sex.”

“It’s a different thing. It’s not depersonalizing.”

“It’s _bizarre_. Why did Leader Snoke make you join the knights, anyway?”

Ren paused before answering, hesitant or perhaps just thoughtful. “I wasn’t progressing to his liking.” He looked up, eyes tracking across the ceiling. “I had a lot of power – I was unlocking more every day, but I was unstable.”

“You tell me this like it is news to me. I had to redistribute funds to deal with your last little outburst. Thanks to you all the maintenance workers on deck C are taking a pay cut.”

“It was much worse than that – the dark side is all about harnessing rage and other extreme emotions, so some spill-over is to be expected. Back then I kept being tempted to… to the light. Snoke thought the knights would help me, that their order would provide some structure and stop me from fluctuating so intensely. So he called out to them through the Force and they came.”

“What was it like when you met them – the knights? Didn’t they frighten you?”

“No, why would they?”

“You must have been young – _unstable_ , as you said – and your master just told you ‘here, you belong to these weird-smelling, masked people now?’ I can’t imagine it was a very cheerful prospect.”

“I’m not shallow like you are.” Ren ignored Hux’s snort of amusement at this. “I could hear them, I could hear them hear each other. I could sense their bond.”

“And you wanted that – to be subsumed into their… mass?”

Ren looked off again. “Before I was Kylo Ren there was a weak, foolish boy called Ben. Ben was training to be a Jedi. Do you know anything about the light side of the Force?”

“No, but I’m willing to bet that it’s every bit as tedious and self-important as what you practice.”

“The Jedi teach that you must not have any strong emotions or connections – love should be calm, impersonal. Ben was very lonely. He felt that no-one truly understood him, or cared for him.”

“Every teenager thinks that – why do you have to make everything so mystical and loaded with significance?”

“Shut up,” Ren snapped. “Anyway, I met the knights and I saw that what my old master had taught me was a lie – connection was not weakness, it was strength. I envied them. I wanted more than anything for them to find me worthy, to take me and hold me close. To never let me go, no matter how badly I failed or far I strayed.”

“You talk about them like they’re your lovers.”

Ren gave a rueful smile. “Ben used to dream of having a lover. You see, that was the most profound connection he could imagine having with another person – he was ignorant as well as weak.”

“What were they like, little Ben’s imaginary lover? Did they have nice feet?”

Ren scowled at him. “Stop distracting me – I’m telling you the story of how I joined the knights. So next there were some trials and ritual ordeals, but you won’t have the patience to listen to me talk about any of that. I passed them, that’s all that really matters. Then the knights accepted me and made me Kylo Ren.”

“So they named you?”

Ren dipped his hand in the water, swirling it around. “No, we don’t have names – it’s a title they give to their leader. It means both ‘blessed one’ and ‘outcast’.”

“That doesn’t exactly sound flattering.”

“It is. It’s the greatest honour – they would not allow someone unworthy to serve them, to lead them through the galaxy.”

“But you’re Snoke’s apprentice, too.”

“So?”

“What if he ordered you to do something that endangered the knights, or went against their principles?”

Ren frowned at this and looked up sharply. “Why would he?”

“I don’t know, it was a hypothetical question. I’m just pointing out that you can’t serve two causes at once.”

Ren reached over to the wall and pressed something that made all the water start to drain out of the tub. “Come on, you’re just annoying me to stall for time.” He clambered out of the bath and wrapped himself in a towel, throwing a second one at Hux’s head.

When they had dried off, Ren sat Hux down on the edge of the tub and combed his hair, his touch, as ever, just a little too rough, the blunt tines stringing against Hux’s scalp.

“Give me that, my parting is on the other side,” Hux snatched the comb and amended the error, then stood up to deliver some of the same rough treatment to Ren’s thick, unruly hair.

“Ow, that’s my ear,” Ren hissed with a pained, resentful look.

“They’re rather hard to manoeuvre around.” Hux stared down at the comb in his hand. “Why am I even doing this? Fix your own damn hair.”

Ren took the comb and tossed it into the sink, turning towards the fogged-up mirror to artfully rearrange the damp locks with his fingers, tilting his head to the side critically.

“Yes, yes, you’re gorgeous. Are you quite finished? Can we proceed to the next stage of the farce?”

“So eager,” Ren grinned at Hux’s reflection. He then turned around and pulled off his towel, tossing it into the empty tub. Hux refused to dip his gaze or stare; instead, with an affected casualness, he unfastened his own towel and draped it tidily over the side of the tub. He felt the heat radiating from Ren’s body as the other man moved past him towards the door, it made the flesh of his back tingle. Sternly, he reminded himself that male nudity was no unfamiliar thing – he had showered next to a dozen other boys every morning for the entirety of his adolescence.

Ren led him through into the main living space, where he had already cleared aside what little furniture there was and laid down mats. It almost looked like a combat arena.

“On the mat and kneel,” Ren instructed before going off to collect his ritual knick-knacks.

Hux rolled his eyes and complied. It was cool in the room and he shivered, an unpleasant feeling of vulnerability coming over him. Ren seemed to be entirely comfortable with his nakedness, but then again, Ren was broad-shouldered, muscular and extremely well-endowed, so why wouldn’t he be?

Hux stared at his own pale thighs where they were pressed together and cupped his hand delicately over his flaccid penis. He found himself thinking about how hilarious his adolescent peers had found his bright red pubic hair.

“Stop brooding,” said Ren, his knees hitting the flooring with a slapping sound, arms full of jars. “No-one’s going to laugh at your junk – it’s fine.”

“It’s a good thing you only ever have sex with other social outcasts. ‘It’s fine’ isn’t exactly seduction.”

Ren snorted and began to arrange the items around them. “What would you know about seduction? You project a force field of _don’t touch me_.” He rose to his feet again and padded off into another room, returning a few moments later with a steaming cup, which he bent down and placed carefully in its spot in the ring, then stepped over, kneeling down again near Hux, so close that their knees almost touched.

“Ready?” he asked, eyes searching Hux’s face.

Hux moistened his dry lips and nodded. “Which of us is going to be in the middle?”

“We both are, this time.”

“Showing me the ropes, are you? That’s very noble.”

“No, it’s necessary. The ritual is performed whenever there is a misalignment, when one or more of us is pulled apart from the others. The one who has been separated is the one who needs to purify and reconnect.”

“In other words, it’s always _you_ getting fucked?”

Ren scowled. “That’s not what it means.”

“Really though – how often, since you joined, has it been someone other than you in the middle?”

“Shut up.”

“Wait,” Hux grinned slyly, “does that mean that if I manage to _keep in alignment,_ or however you put it, between now and next time, I get to keep my clothes on and have you kneel down and service me?”

Ren sighed. “Look, keep your pathetic power fantasies for when you’re getting off alone.” He leaned back on one hand and lifted the steaming cup, then offered it to Hux. “Here, drink. One big gulp, try not to taste it.”

“What is this stuff?” Hux peered into the translucent brown liquid. It smelled herbal with a hint of something musty and fungus-like.

“It’s a mixture. Nothing synthetic.”

“Great, informative. What does it do?”

“The effects differ from person to person. Some people find it a stimulant, others an aphrodisiac – some experience psychoactive effects. Mostly, it lowers inhibitions and makes you experience physical sensations more intensely.”

“I take it it’s not optional?”

“No. Drink it.”

 Hux took a breath and held it, then took a large gulp, throwing his head back. It tasted revolting, but he managed to maintain a more or less neutral expression.

“Well done,” Ren said, then he knocked back the remainder and coughed, face twisting in disgust. “I hate this part. The first time I tried it I threw up and had to start the ritual all over again.”

“There is such a thing as too much information, Ren.”

Ren ignored him, replacing the cup in the circle and taking up the jar of unguent. “You know what to do with this?”

“Yes, I think I can manage covering myself in… what is this?” Hux rubbed the oily substance between his fingers, it smelled vaguely rancid.

“Clarified gundark blubber.”

Hux felt his lip curl back. “I’m truly sorry I ever asked.”

They worked in silence and Hux began to feel a renewed surge of awkwardness. Ren looked very serious and intense, he touched himself with a brisk efficiency. Hux turned away and tried to make his body more compact. He jumped and gave a yelp of surprise when he felt a warm hand on his back.

“Here,” Ren said, “this part is hard to reach.” He rubbed the centre of Hux’s back and up over his shoulders. “Will you do mine?”

Hux could feel his own neck flushing bright red. He was half-hard already and felt very exposed. He absolutely did not want to turn around and let Ren see it, even though he knew concealing it would be futile – Ren had the ability to wander in and out of his mind at will, Hux simply keeping his back turned was not going to preserve his fragile dignity.

“Hey,” Ren said, replacing his large hand on Hux’s shoulder and rubbing. “Listen – it’s ok if you’re turned on, and it’s ok if you’re not. It’s ok if you come and it’s ok if you don’t. You don’t have to worry about any of that. No-one’s going to laugh at you for feeling something, or not feeling something.”

“Well,” Hux said quietly. “Isn’t that _enlightened_ of you all?”

Ren’s arms slid around him slowly, holding him in a loose embrace. He felt a light kiss against his brand and expected it to sting, but it didn’t. Ren’s mouth was as soft as it looked.

“You’re doing well. I know it’s not easy for you to let go.” Ren released his hold and pulled his hands back to Hux’s shoulders, kneading them with a firm, uncharacteristically careful pressure.

Hux dipped his head and tried to breathe. His skin felt burning hot – which was impossible, given what he knew to be the temperature of the room. It had to be an effect of the disgusting potion. “Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not,” Ren said, and then he let go. When Hux looked over his shoulder he saw Ren had turned his own back and was holding his hair up in a knot, baring his neck.

“You have a brand!”

“Of course – we all do. Didn’t you see it before, when you were _watching_?”

“I wasn’t exactly staring at your _neck_.” Hux turned and shuffled closer, reaching for more of the unguent. He rubbed it between his hands and smoothed it over the scarred length of Ren’s back.

“I’ve never…” Ren began.

“What?”

“I’ve never had someone have lustful thoughts about me before.”

Hux traced the raised scar with a slippery fingertip. “Do I offend you, o holy virgin and blessed outcast?”

“No.”

Hux rested his chin on Ren’s shoulder and looked at his profile. He had his eyes closed, or nearly so. “Have you ever been kissed?”

“No.”

“That’s amazing. All the things you’ve done with that mouth and yet kissing never occurred to you.”

“The knights don’t—”

“Yes, you probably don’t fancy licking a visor or a metal grille.”

Ren’s eyes fluttered open and he inhaled sharply, moving forward onto his knees and away from Hux. “We have to hurry, they are nearly ready.”

“Oh,” Hux said, blinking. For a brief moment he had almost forgotten why they were there. Ren retrieved the tall bottle of scented oil – the source of that resin scent that was so prevalent the night of Hux’s impromptu induction into the order. The stopper was cold against his pulse points and the substance tingled as it dried.

Ren then took a portion of the gifted ashes and tipped them into the small metal chafing dish with some from his own collection. Adding a slug of the oil as before, he took a small bone awl and mixed up the grey slurry. The tip of the awl was sharp and Hux felt certain it would leave scratches on his pale, easily marked skin, but he did not protest. Ren’s hair tickled his cheek as he leaned up to put the order’s symbol on Hux’s forehead. The attention was very soothing, hypnotic almost, and Hux became aware of how truly sensitive his skin had become. He began to think of his mother again, and how, when he was a very small child, she would help him button up his clothes and smooth his hair. The actions were very different, but there was an underlying sameness of intention – wanting to make him presentable, to make it plain that he was well cared for.

“Don’t smudge them,” Ren said when he was finished. “Sit still.”

“What does it mean?” Hux pointed towards where Ren was tracing the figure onto his own brow, eyes closed – perhaps using the Force in lieu of a mirror. “The symbol,” he clarified.

“It means Knights of Ren.”

“Yes, but it must have some great, weighty significance you’re itching to tell me about.”

“I thought you didn’t care about mysticism.”

“Well I do have it stamped indelibly on my skin, so I might as well know what it’s supposed to signify.”

“Do you know what a sigil is?”

“A fancy word for symbol.”

“No,” Ren frowned as he went to work on his left pectoral. “It’s a _super-condensed_ symbol – so you can take a variety of images and ideas and simplify them down and combine them. Then you have a sigil.”

“Great. So glad I asked.”

“It’s a vehicle for power – for intentions and impulses. When I’m meditating I can channel— oh forget it!” he broke off as glanced up at Hux and found that he was rolling his eyes. “The lines are pathways. The dot is the knights’ circle.”

“Stars help your apprentice if you ever get one.” 

Ren completed the rest of his decorations in silence, an almost comical look of concentration on his face. Next, he placed the chafing dish between them and set it alight with a blue crackle of energy from his fingertip. Hux closed his eyes against the smoke and tried to take shallow breaths. He could feel the shift as Ren began to direct the smoke with the Force, the currents wrapping and twisting it around his body. His eyes flew open as he felt the touch of fingertips against his own. Ren was gazing at him intensely and he held out his hands, palms upwards. Hux laid his own, palms down, on top. Ren’s skin was as hot as his own and the touch felt electric. He wondered if Ren was doing that or if it was an effect of the drug – he could feel Ren’s pulse jumping against his fingertips. His breathing stuttered – he could taste the smoke, corpse ash bitter on his tongue. Hux had never been in a live battle, only clean, logical simulations. Ren showed him the smoke and chaos, the cries of fear and agony. He let Hux feel the berserker rage that flowed through him on that last mission, the violent shudder that ran through his saber arm as he pierced a man’s chest. Just as Hux began to shake and feel that he could not bear the intensity for much longer, it suddenly passed away, lifting like a dream upon waking. When Hux opened his eyes most of the smoke in the room was gone, whisked away by the air circulators.

“Do you know how to meditate?” Ren asked, drumming his fingertips against Hux’s wrists.

Hux narrowed his eyes. “What do you think?”

“It’s alright, I’ll help you. Relax, don’t resist.”

“What—” Hux felt his mind dilate, as if something had pushed its way in and displaced every thought and memory. The something was very bright and cold, like the light of a distant star. He could hear a sharp hum like the sound of a turbine spinning – he thought it was the bones of his own inner ear vibrating.

He did not know how long the moment lasted – he had passed into stasis, non-time. With a sudden sucked in breath he was back in the room, staring at Ren’s face. Ren was perspiring lightly, his lips parted and a startling, intense look in his eyes.

“There,” Ren said. “You’re clean now. Can you feel that?”

Hux felt a panicked urge to check his memories, to pat down his own mind like checking through an overcoat for his gloves and comm. In case – what? In case Ren had stolen them, or wiped them from existence? He tried to conjure up the humiliating memories he had been dwelling on just the other day while lying in his berth – they were still there, but their impact seemed muted, somehow.

Ren gave him a broad, triumphant smile – the dimples it caused made him look goofy. His pupils were already dilated and a brief glance downwards confirmed that he had gotten hard. Hux felt pretty smug about that until he realised he was, too, and that was the source of the hot, tight feeling in his loins. Feeling bold and still full of Ren’s light and heedless dynamism, he reached over and brushed the back of his fingers up the underside of Ren’s cock.

Ren inhaled sharply and caught his wrist. “Not yet. Come on, we have to finish preparing.”

Hux tried to cast his mind back to the ceremony he had witnessed and remember what else they had to do. It came to him like a blaster shot: Ren working his fingers into himself. Was Hux really going to do that – was he going to let Ren watch? Would Ren do it for him – insert himself as confidently into Hux’s body as he did his mind?

“Perhaps we should go to separate rooms for the next part,” Hux suggested hurriedly.

“Why?” Ren looked at him and blinked, pausing as he unscrewed the lid of yet another jar. “Oh, you’ve never done it before.”

“Why should I have?” Hux shot back. “Had you, before you were inducted into the order, I mean?”

“Yes. That’s how I masturbate. I’ve always liked it – since I was a teenager.”

Hux imagined a gangly teenage Ren fingering himself experimentally, thrilled and ashamed. He flushed. “Don’t say that like _I’m_ the weird one. The majority of men do not get off from anal stimulation.”

Ren raised one shoulder in a negligent shrug and gave Hux a slightly incredulous look. “If you say so.” He rubbed his glistening fingers together and then slid down onto one elbow, reaching back.

“You’re just going to – right in front of me?”

Ren snorted. “It’s not like you haven’t seen me do this before.”

“But it’s a different thing.”

Ren turned his face to the side on the mat, slowly breaching himself with his middle finger. “Why. Because this time I can look back?” He made a low sound of pleasure in his chest – that was another difference: the security feed had been soundless. Hux’s imagination had not been able to supply the right low, yearning pitch of Ren’s moans.

“Do I have to?” Hux asked. He did not feel embarrassed, or exposed, strangely. The drug made him feel insulated from everything, including his own mortification. He remained uncertain, however, finding it hard to locate his own bodily desires beyond the captivating image of Ren’s own.

“You don’t have to do anything,” Ren said breathlessly. “They will take whatever you want to give.” He hissed, turning his head to press his forehead to the floor, worked another finger into himself.

Hux took up the lubricant and poured a few drops onto his fingertips, rubbing them together to feel the consistency – thick, non-synthetic. Ren had used a lot of it: his whole hand was slick and shiny, some of it had dripped down as far as his inner thighs.

Hux coated his own hand more thoroughly, temporarily hypnotised by the sliding sensation and the light playing over his wet skin. He then eased down onto his back and pulled one knee up to his chest, holding it there. He resisted the urge to wrap his slick hand around his dick, which throbbed at warm, steady rate along with his pulse, or to play with his heavy, tingling balls. He reached back further and pressed against his entrance, pushing in with one fingertip and what seemed like agonising slowness. It did not hurt, but it felt vaguely uncomfortable – pressure and sensation where he wasn’t used to it. He got as far as the second knuckle and pulled back – better, but still on the side of weird rather than pleasurable. He did not think he was feeling the same thing Ren was feeling – his eyelids fluttering, mouth slack.

Hux pressed his teeth against his bottom lip and frowned in concentration. If he moved his finger in a certain way there was an _almost_ feeling, but the angle wasn’t great, his shoulder was starting to cramp up.

He heard the sound of Ren rolling over and opened his eyes to find he was being watched with a dark, intense look.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me I’m not doing this in the approved mystical fashion?”

Ren moved to kneel just below him. Hux felt a sudden jerk as invisible pressure grasped him behind each knee and rocked him back so his ass was tilted upwards. “Better?” Ren asked.

“Why would it be?” Hux could feel all the blood running to his face.

“You can get deeper like this.” Ren took hold of his wrist and pushed for emphasis.

Hux made a strange sound like his body was trying to exhale and inhale at once – a sort of choking gurgle. Ren patted Hux’s thigh and brought his eyebrows together critically. “Can you try with two fingers now? If you bend them a little and feel for where you’re most sensitive, it’ll be better.”

“Why don’t you just do it for me, if you’re such an expert?” Hux tried to make this seem like a challenge, even though he was fairly sure that Ren knew exactly how the large hand wrapped around his inner thigh was affecting him.

“You’re supposed to be learning the steps for yourself.”

“Oh, this is a teaching moment? I didn’t realise.” Hux pulled his finger out and tried to press back in with two. It was slow and awkward until Ren reached for the lubricant and carefully poured it around his working fingers, murmuring something low that sounded like an encouragement.

Ren’s big hand squeezed his thigh again. “Can you feel it: how pleased they are that you’re doing this for them – that you’re honouring them with your body?”

Hux felt his eyelids flutter against the images that suddenly jerked to the surface. He groaned.

“Do you need to come?” Ren asked. “It’s ok if you need to release some tension. I can last now, but at first I used to – I would have to take the edge off. They understood.”

Hux swallowed, slowly disengaged his fingers. His skin felt hot and hyper-sensitised and he was intensely aware of the fact that it was all one continuous organ. His dick was still throbbing with his pulse – it was a good feeling, but not an urgent one. “No,” he told Ren. “I can wait – I want to wait.”

Ren smiled and the force barrier holding Hux’s legs back disappeared, letting him rock back down onto the floor, his feet hitting the mat with a thud.

“Well,” he blinked up at Ren, the light blurry through his lashes. “Are we ready?”

“Almost,” Ren moved up onto his knees, laying his hands flat. “We have to let them know we’re waiting, let them come to us.”

Hux rolled onto his side and slowly got to his knees, he moved to where Ren was, pressing their kneecaps together. Ren held out his hands and Hux laid his own on top, then Ren leaned forward and stayed there. Hux mimicked his action, leaning in until their foreheads were pressed together: Ren’s skin was hot, slick with perspiration; so was Hux’s own. He should have found the action repulsive but it was reassuring – Ren was so full of life and vitality, and here with him.

“What do I have to do?” Hux murmured, voice hushed as he spoke the words into the space between their mouths.

“Quiet your mind. Let them in.”

Hux closed his eyes and tried to find the knights, wherever the point of their connection was in his brain. He knew it by the pressure – like water rushing against a weir, their voices all held back and more or less at bay. He breathed out and let it go. He felt his body swaying against the sudden influx of images and impulses, his mouth was moving but he had no idea what he was saying. 

The next thing he knew, there were gloved hands on his face and looming presences above. A simple feeling of joy and rightness came to him from Ren’s mind. There was really no shame or apprehension in him: he was never more himself, more perfectly content, than when surrounded by the knights and in their hands.

The hands on Hux’s face trailed downwards, skimming down his neck and to his shoulders. Hux turned and looked up into the sunken, skull-like mask. He reached under the heavy tunic and worked quickly to unfasten the button he found there, then to slide down a heavy industrial zipper. The knight moved to assist him, pulling out their cock and giving it a few strokes with their gloved hand. Hux watched precome beading on the tip and _wanted_ in some way that was different from his usual way of wanting. He opened his mouth and leaned in to lap delicately at the head of the knight’s cock, circling it with the point of his tongue. They tasted clean and Hux wondered if they had their own rituals of preparation for this.

Hux moaned softly, leaning in to take more, to suck. The knight touched his hollowed cheek and he felt a sensation like a channel opening up or connecting. He could feel the weight of the dick in his mouth, the press against his soft palate, but he could also feel the knight’s coiling pleasure. More than that, the sense of intimacy and _fate_ , almost, that through all the wide galaxy they were here, now, occupying the same space. He felt hands settling on his back – more than one pair – and knew the others were joining too. The image of a burned out shell of a village told Hux that the figure kneeling on his left side was the bulky, broad-shouldered knight with the much dented helmet. They were petting him in long, firm strokes from his shoulder to this hip and their left hand was underneath him, pressed to the soft space just below his sternum.

Hux grasped the narrow hips of the knight he knew as bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape and began to bob his head, feeling the sensation spiraling within himself. He was impressed with the knowledge that whatever he was able to give was enough – that his pleasure was their pleasure; a feedback loop of mutual satisfaction. He could hear Ren moaning, his voice muffled slightly, something shifting and wet, and the sound of skin meeting skin. In response to his curiosity, one of the knights touching Hux took away a hand and laid it on Ren – conducting the link of sensation and bright, vulgar images. Ren was on his back, knees hitched up to his chest. The knight Hux recognised as linked to the image dead-master-in-the-snow was rubbing the head of their dark blue dick along his cleft, pushing in shallowly and then pulling back, teasing him in a way Hux could feel that Ren loved: slippery heat and pressure. The Zeltron knight with the keypad mask (now otherwise known as feet-viewed-through-a-grate) was kneeling over Ren’s face, legs spread wide so Ren could tilt his chin back and work his mouth against their dark pink vulva. The knight was leaning forward and had their arms braced on their Chiss companion’s shoulders so that together the trio formed a triangular shape of interlocking parts. Hux thought deliriously about sigils and felt the amusement of bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape rising up through their body.

Hux closed his eyes and let the extraneous sensation trickle to the back of his mind: he felt where he was held in place securely; he flexed his hands and felt the knight’s hipbones somewhere under the cloth, the dick in his mouth twitching as Hux refocussed his attention. Hux leaned forward and took the shaft deeper, swallowing around it experimentally and then moaning at the echo of pleasure that coiled in his own belly. The knight was going to come soon, Hux could feel that – how much they wanted to have him taste and be covered in their semen; that it was pure and only given to those who shared their bond. The knight had never loved an outsider, and never would. They were the spring and the cistern, they said, clear water rising from deep within to circle around and nourish; contained but ever-flowing.

Hux would not have accepted this bizarre sentiment in words, but there was something compelling about its immediacy in transmission. The images and sensations were bombarding him like the waves of a sonic shower, dislodging all the old ideas caked around him. When he felt the knight shudder, Hux pulled back and caught the first spurt on his tongue, he ducked his head and let the rest of it cast across his back. He swallowed and allowed the knight to gather him closer, rubbing his cheek against the rough fabric of the grey and black cloak. He was comforted by images the knight seemed to think was the future – something with all of them, with Ren holding his ignited saber, and a great stone chamber, lit from high above with shafts of sunlight.

Before Hux could really dwell on this insight, he felt gentle but insistent hands on his hips, drawing him back. He looked back over his shoulder to find it was the cleaver-wielding knight, blood-spiraling-in-green-water. This knight, as memory served, was not human – he remembered Ren leaning up on his elbow, the strange arrow-shaped tip of the knight’s cock fluttering against his bottom lip like some curious sea-creature. The knight in front of him grasped him at the base of the throat; a light, firm pressure as a mother animal might hold her young. Behind him, blood-spiraling-in-green-water stroked his inner thighs, then trailed their gloved hand upwards, thumb swiping through the mess of lubricant and pushing lightly against his hole, a gesture Hux could feel was asking for permission.

Hux trembled and shuddered, swallowing back to find his mouth still tasted like the generous offerings of the first knight. He felt the hand on his right shoulder flexing and reached through the connecting-pin knight to Ren, who was being fucked in deep regular strokes, his head now cradled in the Zeltron knight’s lap. Hux felt how transported Ren was, the way the sliding pressure and sensation of fullness thrilled him. Ren was here in this moment, with all of them, but he was also in the past, with an abject, lonely version of himself who could only masturbate and imagine. Dead-master-in-the-snow angled their hips to ensure their cock dragged sweetly against Ren’s prostate on the downstroke; feet-viewed-through-a-grate held his face and rubbed their gloved fingertips against his scalp. _Ours-fated_ , the two knights said. Ren sobbed loudly and Hux could feel that none of the knights were disgusted.

Hux buried his face in the musty cloak of the knight before him and tilted his hips back. He heard the knight’s clothing rustle and then the sharp sting of something wet and cool against his inner thigh. Through the spark of insight generated by the brief contact, Hux learned that the knight had slapped him with their extending cock. He buried his face in bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape’s robes and whimpered. Abstractly, he knew he was doing something shameful, but the drug made that knowledge feel remote and unimportant. It was as if the loud, insistent part of him that normally governed his propriety and safeguarded his pride had been peeled away, just leaving the parts of him that were raw and wanting. Blood-spiraling-in green-water pushed the head of their cock against his perineum, slid it upwards until it was pressed against his entrance; then, inexplicably, paused. Hux felt the strange fluttering sensation of the tip and all his nerve-endings flared and tingled. Would he have to ask? Would he have to say “please violate millennia of societal taboo and fuck me with your I-don’t-even-know-what-species-you-are dick?”

The knight stroked the small of his back and Hux gathered that this is not what they were waiting for – they didn’t want his shame, they had no use for it. They showed him an image of a black glove on a dark orange thigh, a huge pale scar wrapped around the limb like a mapped continent. The knight’s own initiation – they had been aware of their own difference and unloveliness, their lack of experience with anything physical, beyond controlled and precise acts of violence. _I was as you are_ , they were telling him; they had been comforted and worshipped, as Hux was comforted and worshipped now.

Hux’s mind struggled briefly with this comparison but it was easier to go lax and accept it than to marshal the energy to reject it. When the knight felt this give, they moved, easing into him slowly. The coolness of their body was startling. The strange pointed glans was soft and went in easily, but then Hux felt himself stretching around the thick middle section of the knight’s shaft. The knight supporting him on his left pushed against his solar plexus and got him breathe out steadily. Blood-spiraling-in green-water gave one last tilt of their hips and the pressure bottomed-out.

Hux breathed in, his inhalation stuttering when he felt the organ inside him move. The knight’s thighs were still pressed flush to the back of his own, they were not thrusting their hips – it was the dick itself, moving independently of the rest of the body, elongating and retracting. The thick middle section pulled through him like a bead on a string, pressing and stretching from the inside.   

The knight hardly had to move their body at all to fuck him, squeezing Hux’s waist and swaying faintly, as if in a trance. Hux felt his mouth fall open and his mind go blank as his awareness shrank to that shifting pressure inside him. Distantly, he could feel that his own dick was leaking copiously, but he did not sense that upwards rush of impending orgasm – it was a high, intense plateau, stranger and more satisfying than anything he had ever experienced before.

The knight made a deep, resonant sound that ended in a swooping lilt. Hux felt their cock pulse and then the rush of cool liquid inside him. The knight slowly began to retract from him, semen trickling out of Hux and rolling down this thighs. Muscles trembling with effort, Hux raised himself higher on his elbows and looked back over his shoulder. Blood-spiraling-in green-water swiped a finger along the length of his inner thigh and then leaned over, offering the come-smeared glove to him. Again, Hux’s mind briefly turned over the possibility of refusing and found it effortful and unnecessary – he opened his mouth and slid his tongue along the soft, well-creased leather, then he pressed a kiss to the palm and turned his head into the caress that followed.

At the urging of hands on his shoulders, Hux rolled onto his side, bumping his forehead against a fabric-covered knee. Dizzy and flushed, Hux raised his head and saw burned-out-shell-of-a-village was sitting cross-legged, their dented metal mask making them look like a neglected droid. Hux dragged himself closer, resting his burning cheek against the knight’s thigh as he reached for the fastenings of their breeches underneath the bulky coat. A hand grasped his wrist and pulled it away, replacing it on the knight’s knee. Hux looked up quizzically and the knight rested a heavy hand on his head to encourage him to lay it back down.

Instead of working free a new and mysterious sex organ, the knight folded back the cuff of their glove and offered Hux a strip of dark brown skin. Hux pressed his lips to it and let his tongue dart out to taste the salt of their perspiration, feeling their pulse moving just below the translucent flesh. He then closed his eyes and watched the flickering images they showed him slide by: the village, still smouldering; themselves among the wreckage; a charred skull that they rolled under one booted foot. Hux could tell that the place was significant, but not whether it was somewhere the knight had once thought of as home and lost, or a deed they considered a triumph. Maybe it was both. _The past is empty_ , the knight was saying, _we do not live there_. They stroked Hux’s cheek with a forefinger, the seam of the glove rough and catching.

As the knight’s vision faded, Hux once again became aware of the room around him, the hands on his body and the sounds beyond – Ren making a soft, wet noise as he put his mouth on something. Hux sat up slowly, the downwards rush of blood making him dizzy. The knight who had been kneeling between them, shrapnel-embedded-in-a-wall, was now leaning back against the Chiss knight, dead-master-in-the-snow, and the Zeltron, feet-viewed-through-a-grate, who each supported one shoulder, arms wrapped around one another’s backs. Ren was lying between the first knight’s spread knees, fingers hooked in the fabric and tugging it down so he could get better access. He was licking between the knight’s labia with long, slow drags of his tongue. He gazed up at their mask between half-lowered eyelashes, pupils huge and eyes shining, hair wild and tangled. Hux wondered if he looked like that, too, and half wished he could see himself. 

Hux felt the gentle push at his back, one of the knights urging him on. He went the short distance on his knees and touched Ren’s shoulder. Ren raised his head with a drowsy, quizzical noise and Hux leaned in and kissed him, because his mouth looked very red and wet, and because he wanted to taste the knights on Ren, and for Ren to taste them on himself. Ren turned out to be a sloppy kisser, he held Hux too tightly and almost choked him with his tongue. Hux then recalled that Ren had never kissed anyone before. He knew that were he in his right mind he would make a cutting comment about Ren’s inexperience, but there was no need to talk here, and Ren quickly adapted, reading Hux’s pleasure and displeasure through their connection.

When the kiss broke, they stared at each other, panting. This close he could see the strange wavy patterns in Ren’s irises, a pool of darker brown and a lighter one bounding it. Hux stroked his cheek to feel the texture of his skin and the little bumps of his moles. He ran his fingertip over the edge of the saber-slash scar, wondering at how delicate the join was there. _You are so beautiful_ , he thought, _why have I never told you that?_ He found himself genuinely perplexed by this: there must have been a reason, but Hux could not recall it. Ren was thinking rapturous, adoring thoughts back at him, but also, inexplicably, thinking about that stupid seashell.

Hux felt the amusement of the knight nearest them and turned his head, breaking away from Ren’s intense gaze. Shrapnel-embedded-in-a-wall was watching them, fingers slipping between their folds and rubbing while Hux and Ren were distracted. Hux watched, feeling his brand prickle and a shiver run down his spine. In response to his interest, the knight held out their gloved hand and let him lick the shining fluids from the middle two fingers, but the only things he could taste were leather and whatever oil it was the knight used to condition it. He eased himself down onto his belly, sliding closer between their spread thighs. One of Ren’s hands came to rest between Hux’s shoulder blades, encouraging, and with the other he reached over and tugged down the fabric of the opening in the knight’s breeches, holding it wide with his long fingers.

Hux had had very few opportunities to see female genitalia close-up. He did not watch pornography – always, irrationally, filled with dread that what he watched on the holonet might be traced back to him. The sex worker from the bar had not asked for foreplay, and he had given only the briefest, furtive glance at what lay between her thighs before he turned his eyes to the ceiling and tried to maintain an erection. On the same trip as his disastrous and merely technical loss of virginity, Hux’s cohorts had dragged him to a red light district and down a street where scantily-clad women of various humanoid species stood on display in pods faced with transparisteel. These women had been taught to aim their eyes down at the ground and not to look back at those who appraised them. Hux’s cohorts were excited by the power to inspect and choose with impunity – a power they had never known before, but which nonetheless seemed to them right and proper; a fruition of the implicit promise sealed by their upbringings aboard the rusted Imperial-class Star Destroyers.

Further down the street were brightly-lit banks of vending machines that sold sex toys and pornography, projections of their wares hovering above them. The women and men in the images were hairless, any bodily imperfections digitally erased and their skin tinted to be as garish as a neon sign. Again, Hux was left with the feeling that he had failed some culturally agreed-upon rite of passage, and that his own desires must be abnormal, since unrepresented and uncatered for in this consumerist den.

The experience had unsettled him. Although recalling it in his current warm, muted state insulated him from the sense of turmoil and shame, he was aware that he had involuntarily broadcasted it to Ren and the knights. Shrapnel-embedded-in-a-wall put a hand to the back of his neck as if to say, _enough brooding, you are here now_ , and he dipped his head to lick at them slowly, as Ren had done.

The knight’s skin – what Hux could see of it between Ren’s fingers – was a golden brown and their pubic hair was dark and tightly curled – spreading up much higher than Hux would have expected, in his limited understanding of such things. The outer labia parted against the pressure of the tip of his tongue, what lay beneath was musky and wet, faintly saline-tasting. He dragged the flat of his tongue up to the protrusion of the knight’s clitoris and rolled against it, drawing back to suckle gently as he had seen Ren doing. The feedback from the knight was of a flower bud opening, and then the crash of an ocean wave – he could feel the warm surge of their pleasure and it made his own erectile tissue give an answering twitch.  

He opened his mouth wider and trailed downwards, pushing into them and feeling the channel clench and then contract around the working muscle of his tongue. As he moved back up, he felt Ren’s hand shift, two fingers moving in to replace Hux’s tongue. As Ren’s fingers slipped in up to the second knuckle, he gave a deft final push and a twist that made the knight grip the back of Hux’s head more tightly. Hux could feel it against his mouth when they came, the rhythmic pulse that went all through their lower body and faded in slowly receding aftershocks. Ren pulled his fingers out slowly and gave them to Hux to taste – Hux sucked avidly and then let the fingers drag their way out over his bottom lip, trailing from his mouth with a pop. He rolled over onto his back and reached for Ren, grabbing his arm so Ren would crawl closer and duck his head close enough for Hux to lean up and kiss him.      

Ren braced his arms either side of Hux’s head and pressed him down against the mat, the weight of Ren’s body forcing the air from his lungs in a dizzying rush. As they kissed, Hux thought about how much he wanted Ren to hold him down and fuck him – his ass was still tingling and sensitive, and he craved more of that unfamiliar pressure. Ren was thinking that he wanted to climb on top of Hux and ride him into the mat. These were aimless desires though, not ones either of them would make a move to fulfil – Hux understood, dimly, that their role was to give and accept and be open, not to take something selfishly. The knights would tell them what they wanted and how to join with them.

Ren rolled off him and moved to the centre of the mat, kneeling and waiting for Hux to join him. Hux positioned himself close enough that their kneecaps touched and bowed his head so their foreheads could press together – the same pose they had held in the beginning, willing the ritual to start. They were both sweating now, covered in the knights’ offerings, their ash-markings smeared. Ren took Hux’s hands and squeezed them and he felt it again – a surge of ridiculous adoration that cycled through them both. Hux opened his eyes and looked at Ren’s face, which was too close to focus on – more like an abstract painting of a face: just the suggestion of the curve of his cheek and the pink of his lips trailing into shadow. In his peripheral vision he could see shadows moving, the knights drawing close, gathering around them and slipping arms around one another to form a circle that would shield Hux and Ren from the rest of the galaxy. He heard Ren gasp as if waking suddenly from a vivid dream. Ren’s right hand slipped from Hux’s grip and moved into his own lap, wrapping around his cock. The sensation transmitted from Ren’s mind into Hux’s was so intense that for a split-second that felt like much longer he could not decide whether it was pleasure or pain. Hux tried to control his ragged breathing and reached down to grasp hold of his own penis, as if that would ground him. It felt like it did – like completing a circuit, or clearing a channel for some force to flow through. He flexed his hand around the base of his cock and felt Ren’s hand move too, the directly-experienced and projected sensations syncing up in a way that was disorientating, almost transcendent, giving him the sense of being both inside his body and separate from it; tethered, but floating.

As Hux worked his hand on himself – slowly at first, but gaining in momentum and confidence as the mirroring became more rhythmic and natural – he watched Ren. He took in how tall and upright Ren’s body was, his broad shoulders pulled back; Ren’s immense hand on his thick, curved dick, foreskin gliding over the wet tip as he stroked. Ren was staring back at Hux, his eyes were wide and his bottom lip quivered faintly along with his harsh breaths. Hux accepted that answering, worshipful gaze, and was surprised to find no resistance in himself. A small part of him was aware of the fact that they were two men, in the middle of a circle of onlookers, watching each other masturbate, but it did not feel ridiculous, or humiliating – it felt satisfying, like slotting something into place.

Orgasm rose up in him with a slow, creeping, intensity, like sap rising through a plant’s stem. The sensation built and built, until every stroke of his hand seemed certain to tip it over the edge. Ren felt the same – Hux could feel his pleasure and anticipation, the contradiction of _too much_ and _not enough_.

“Come for me,” Ren said in a hoarse gasp. Words were not part of the ritual – this was Ren, speaking to Hux, breaking the anonymity for him. Pleading, permission – Hux was not sure which he had needed, but he let go, tilting his head back and squeezing his hand, letting the sensation overflow and spill out of him.

Time seemed to move in jumps. He felt Ren smile against his cheek, panting with a sense of accomplishment as his sweat-damp hair brushed against Hux’s lips. Ren’s hand spreading out and smearing come against his belly. An image came to him: bronze-coloured spheres, spinning about one central point – an orrery. Then the sound again: the resonant buzzing that filled his head and pushed all other awareness aside.

Hux closed his eyes and let himself be laid back. This was the end, this was completion.

*~*~*

“You should drink some water,” Ren said, nudging Hux and offering him a cup. Hux shook his head, eyes still closed and squirmed deeper into the bedclothes. He was dimly aware of being thirsty, but it seemed as if it would be an incredible effort to sit up enough to take a drink when he was so perfectly warm and comfortable. He heard the regular sound of swallowing and opened his eyes to watch Ren’s speckled throat bob up and down. Ren made a satisfied sound and reached over Hux to set down the cup on a bedside table. He laid his arm over Hux on top of the covers, flexed his foot where their legs lay intertwined, then he ducked his chin to look down at Hux and made an amused sound.

“What?” Hux meant the word to be sharp, but it was drowsy and plaintive.

“Just never seen you relaxed before.” Ren seemed to think Hux would be offended by this, as he added: “it’s nice. I like being with you like this.” After a pause he added, in a rush: “I’ve never. You know, really _been_ with someone.”

“What are you talking about?”

“With the knights, it’s very intimate and intense – but I still always wanted more. Someone to be with, afterwards. To just… talk to and touch,” he lifted one of his hands, laid it down again on Hux’s shoulder, “like this.”

Hux frowned, trying to make sense of Ren’s nonsense – he found himself having trouble with words, for some reason. 

“Do you like it?” Ren pressed. “Do you like me? I like you a lot. Sorry, I’m going to stop talking it’s – disinhibition.”

Disinhibition, meaning these were the kinds of things Ren actually thought, deep down. It was laughable really – a powerful lord of the dark side who wanted more than anything to be told Hux liked him back, like an earnest little school child. Hux opened his eyes again and admired the way the light fell on the hollow of Ren’s throat; he leaned in and kissed it, the thin skin of his lips against hot, damp flesh. They were both covered in visible and invisible traces of other people – saliva and sweat and sexual fluids. Hux knew that were he his normal self, he would be anxiously showering himself under a high-setting sonic pulse, but for now he felt content – accomplished, almost. _Disinhibition_.

The knights had gone back to their quarters, but Hux could still feel them there, at the back of his mind, the constant gentle lapping of their thoughts against his own. Not even the drug could dull his sudden sense of the strangeness of it all – or the not-strangeness, that he could become so easily accustomed to his place within this system, with its values that were entirely antithetical to Hux’s own: mysticism and feeling instead of reason and intellect. Still, they weren’t chaotic – there was an order, an internal logic to their proceedings.

“What time is it?” Hux asked, realising he had absolutely no idea. The ritual could have lasted twenty minutes or several days; he had no sense of how time was passing.

Ren kissed his forehead and rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “You have time – you’re not expected back yet. You should sleep for a while.”

Hux wanted to protest this, but even in his altered state he saw how inappropriate it would be to stumble onto the bridge with pupils the size of dinner plates, disinhibited and possibly prone to saying things like “I like you a lot.” He closed his eyes and listened to Ren’s breathing. It was dark in the room and the bed was built into a storage unit. It felt like he was in a nest or a cave – perhaps the primitive human ancestors would be pleased by this, looking in. _That’s nice, he has a habitat_. He started to chuckle at this thought involuntarily.

“What?” asked Ren.

“Nothing. Just a joke I was telling myself.”

“You’re weird.” Ren said this with a mixture of incredulity and fondness.

“Yes. Upon reflection, I think I was poorly socialised.” Hux could feel Ren’s lips curling up in a smile against the top of his head, a little huffed breath of amusement. He squeezed Ren’s waist and then he fell asleep.

Hux woke to Ren clambering over him and the aggressive pinging of a comm device.

“Stay,” Ren patted his body vaguely where it was wrapped in the blankets. “It’s mine.” Ren’s feet hit the floor with a thud and Hux listened to him yawning, a clattering off somewhere in the corner and finally the device was silenced. Weight on the edge of the mattress, Ren’s face lit up by the comm’s backlight. His hair looked hilarious.

“I have to go,” Ren said, the corner of his mouth turning downwards. “I have to meet with Leader Snoke.”

“In person?”

“Yes. It’s probably more training. Or, a mission he can’t tell me about over holo. I don’t know.”

“Can’t he just talk to you with the Force, like the knights do?”

“No. The nature of our bond is different. It’s—” Ren did not finish his sentence, but Hux had the impression he was about to say something disparaging. Perhaps “weaker.” Ren glanced down at him and gave him a troubled look. “I don’t think it will take long, but I don’t know, really.”

“I’ll try not to pine too much while you’re gone,” said Hux, wryly. “Are you taking the knights?”

“No. I have to go alone.”

“Well,” Hux said, and found he didn’t have an end to his sentence. Ren was looking at him with a sort of wary, yearning look. He leaned down and kissed Hux on the lips, just once, as if he was embarrassed, then he got up and left the room, presumably headed for the refresher.

Hux lay in the dark and wondered, idly, if he and Ren were lovers now, and what he was going to think about any of this once he truly sobered up. Perhaps he would have to live the rest of his life spaced-out on mystical narcotics just to be able to cope with the strange new dissonance in his identity. When Ren returned Hux sat up, wrapping the blankets around himself, and watched the other man dress. He felt oddly disappointed to see Ren’s glorious naked body disappear under layer upon layer of dark side black.

“How often do you perform these ‘communion rites’?”

“When we need to. Why, are you looking forward to next time already?”

Hux rolled his eyes. “It’s not that it’s not enjoyable – obviously, it is. But there’s so much _business_ – all the elaborate preparations and the different stages. Wouldn’t it be easier just to fuck when you felt like it?”

Ren gave him an appalled look. “It’s not _fucking_ , Hux. I thought you would at least understand that by now.”

“Yes, yes, it’s very spiritual and uplifting,” Hux waved a hand vaguely. “I’m not denying that – but I’m curious, are you not allowed to – you know, _be intimate_ outside the ritual?”

Ren rubbed his cheek thoughtfully with one long forefinger. “There’s nothing against it, explicitly. As long as you’re with someone who is part of the order and you’re both purified, I don’t see how it would matter. It’s never really come up before. The knights are – they don’t think about things like that. I mean, some of them masturbate. I can tell, sometimes, through the link and I – that excites me.” He winced. “Sorry, disinhibition.” He glanced over at Hux with a look that was somewhere between hope and terror. “Do you want to have sex? With me, I mean. It would have to be with me.”

“So we can both stay ‘virgins’,” Hux made finger quotes, smiling in drowsy amusement. “Pure as the driven snow, and all that?”

“Yes.” Ren stared at him for a moment, intense and mercurial and something like his usual self except for the fact that he still couldn’t seem to stop all his deepest desires from tumbling out of his mouth. “I’d like to, with you. I’ve always wanted to – to just, for it to be simple. I know I’m not supposed to want that, but…”

“Alright, alright,” said Hux, deciding, for once, to just put Ren out of his misery. “We can talk about it more when you get back. I trust I’ll be sober by then?”

 “Yes. And the knights will take care of you.” Ren wrapped his ragged cloak around his neck and lifted his helmet, cradling it against his hip.

“I can actually take care of myself, you know,” Hux objected. “I am a general and commander of the fleet’s flagship.”

It was Ren’s turn to look amused. “Yes, we know.”

He left the room in a flurry of black fabric and Hux scowled for a moment before turning on his side. He dozed a little and as the fug of the narcotic began to lift some of his old paranoid thoughts came back into play. Ideas and implications began to swirl: things Ren had said, and the knights had thought.

He came back to himself with a start, sitting bolt upright in bed, his heart beginning to beat in an unpleasant, skittery rhythm. He threw off the covers and got shakily to his feet, swaying his way to the refresher, where he took a shower and tried to organise his thoughts and rationalise away his panic. He stumbled back to Ren’s bedroom and put his uniform back on – it didn’t seem to fit correctly, feeling too stiff and rough against his still-sensitised skin.

As he made his way down the corridor he was initially relieved to find it empty – then he remembered that Phasma had stopped forcing troopers to patrol this part of the deck; the combined threat of Ren’s volatility and the eldritch creepiness of the knights making it unduly stressful on the troops and leading to a worrying spike in transfers to reconditioning. The quarters of the knights of Ren were just one corridor over, a warren of rooms that no-one had dared step foot inside since the knights were first installed there.

The doors opened automatically for Hux and he stumbled into a dimly-lit room that seemed to be some kind of living area – there were chairs in it, at least. The Knights of Ren were waiting for him, some seated on the furniture, others sitting on the floor cross-legged. There was a holo projector in the corner and Hux wondered for a brief, delirious moment if it came with the rooms, or if they did, in fact, spend their off-hours watching holodramas.

“Now listen,” Hux announced loudly – too loudly, wanting to get the words out before they could distract him with a barrage of images. “I know you can’t speak Basic, but I have some things to say and I want to get them out in words, if only to make it clear to myself.”

“Who told you we can’t speak Basic?” said bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape. Their voice was extremely low-pitched and hoarse, it made Hux feel like something had crawled into his ear.

“I… I assumed.” Hux made a gesture of helpless frustration and almost overbalanced, having to put one hand to the wall to steady himself. “I thought that when I spoke to you and got no response it was because you didn’t understand a word I was saying.”

“We understood. We will always understand,” said dead-master-in-the-snow in a voice that had all the honeyed resonance of an orator. Their masks did not seem to have built in distortion, as Ren’s did, but there was some mechanism that broadcast the sound.

“Words are clumsy at best, deceptive at worst,” said shrapnel-embedded-in-a-wall, moving from a seated position on the floor to a sort of looming crouch, hands dangling between their knees. Their voice was high and reedy, oddly childish.

“Thought to word to lips to air to ear to thoughts again,” bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape made a dismissive gesture. “It is impure.”

“When we speak to you,” dead-master-in-the-snow elaborated, “the Force is our messenger. It does not mangle its message.”

“Right, well,” Hux hesitated. He had not expected his audience to be so chatty.

“Speak. Demand. We’ll answer.” These instructions were given in a soft, strange voice that sounded like three distinct people whispering in unison; its origin was hard to locate, but the accompanying hand movement – a tracing of one glove in the air – made Hux think that it was burned-out-shell-of-a-village who addressed him.

Hux attempted to stand up straighter. “What I demand to know is why you forced me to join your order. Ren – Kylo Ren – thinks you did it to please him, but that’s not the case, is it?”

Dead-master-in-the-snow made a quibbling sound of disagreement. “You were not _forced_. You were given a choice.”

“‘Join or die’ isn’t exactly a choice.”

“Only if you don’t believe death is an option,” the knight continued pleasantly. “Death is always an option.”

The chittering sound of amusement echoed through the room. Hux glared sharply at blood-spiraling-in-green-water, who he now suspected was the source of the noise. He decided to take a different tack. “Tell me about Supreme Leader Snoke. How does he figure in all of this?”

There was silence for a long moment. Hux was not sure whether it was because they were conferring among themselves about what to tell him, or because they had no real awareness of what was external to the order. “You must know of Snoke,” Hux prompted. “Your master’s master? The one who called you to… bring Kylo Ren into the order.”

“The one you call _Supreme Leader_ ,” said feet-viewed-through-a-grate; a rich, almost seductive voice that was full of amusement. “He has not studied our histories or charters. Had he done so, he would know what becomes of fools who try to use the Most Ancient Order of the Knights of Ren to accomplish their own petty aims.”

“He plans to unite the galaxy – how is that petty?”

Chittering again, this time unmistakably derisive, despite its non-human nature.

“He knows nothing of unison,” bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape intoned, their voice so low and resonant it made Hux’s teeth hurt again. “He cares only for power; or what he _thinks_ is power – for there is only one true Force in the galaxy. Snoke will meet his end, for that is the pattern of such fools. The Knights of Ren will not follow him into oblivion, nor will we suffer him to take what has been dedicated unto us.”

“You mean Kylo Ren? You will force him to choose?”

Bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape slowly shook their cowled head, hands clasped before them. “Kylo has already chosen, long ago. He is faithful to us in his heart and in his deeds; he surrounds and protects us. And so, we honour him; we understand his weaknesses and we forgive them. We give him what he needs to overcome.”

“Is that what I am - a security blanket for your volatile master? Another of Snoke’s subordinates you can lure away and bind to your own cause?”

“Yes,” burned-out-shell-of-a-village answered in their three-toned, windy voice. “You are these things. More, too: a little powerless thing with a warrior’s soul, one with a great fate. And so pure – alone, always; untouched by touch.”

“Yes,” agreed bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape, “and now you are one thing more: now you are ours.”

Hux tried to step backwards and felt himself wobble, his foot unsteady beneath him. His head ached and his vision was starting to blur around the edges. “I don’t—”

He felt himself fall but he did not feel himself hitting the ground.

Hux came round to a metal cup being pressed against his mouth, an arm around his shoulder holding him upright.

 _drink_ , said one of the knights, sending him an image of water sinking into cracked, tessellated ground.

The angle of the cup was such that Hux’s options were swallow or choke, so he followed their instructions. The liquid in the cup was faintly sour-sweet and had a plant-like flavour. Hux gasped after he drank it off. The arm across his back hoisted him higher. While Hux was still catching his breath a metal spoon clattered between his teeth and an insistent image told him _eat_. A thick, slightly sweet gruel tipped into his mouth, Hux swallowed and then turned aside his face for the next spoonful, smearing it along his cheek. “What the hell?”

 _nourish-eat-soothe-strength-pure-regain_ , said the knights.

“Yes,” Hux spluttered, “I know what food is. Stop it, I can feed myself.”

The knight who was crouching before him (blood-spiraling-in-green-water), tilted their head in a way that suggested scepticism. They stirred the mixture vigorously and held it out to Hux. The knights all watched intently until he raised a spoonful to his own mouth. “Stop staring at me like that, it’s creepy. Where am I? What time is it?”

None of them answered, continuing to loom in a silent semi-circle. After a moment had passed, one of them sent him an image of a huge, dead star, its depleted core fused into iron. This meant something like _all time is irrelevant until the end_.

“Right,” Hux said, sighing. “I don’t know why I asked you that, really.” 

He looked around himself and found he was sitting on a bench in some kind of workshop. Stripped-down weapons lay along long, narrow tables and there were wires and pieces of moulded plasteel strewn about, the floor littered with metal shavings and parings of leather. Sitting on one of the high shelves, placed prominently, was an unfamiliar mask. Its visor was curiously blank compared to the moulded or decorated ones favoured by the knights.

“Why have you brought me here?” he asked, already alarmed by the answer he had intuited. 

 _eat_ , bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape told him, gesturing sharply. Hux swallowed another spoonful of grainy sludge and waited patiently while the knight went and fetched down the helmet.

When the knight returned, bearing the helmet before them held delicately in their gloved fingertips, the others parted to clear a path. Hux stared at the object, now level with his face, and looked closely at its design. It was not, as he had originally thought, entirely blank. The outermost fringes of the visor were in fact textured, embedded with little iridescent dots, like stars in a night sky. Only the centre of the mask was truly black: a circle of reflective darkness.

“No,” said Hux. “Absolutely not. Look, I came round to the idea of ritual sex, but I draw the line at dark side accessories.”

 _face-join-bound-sight-fit-protect_ , said the knights.

“No,” Hux repeated. “I am – and remain – a general of the First Order. I cannot go around wearing a mask – it’s against uniform regulations, for a start. Also,” he added, in case there was any confusion, “I don’t want to. So… thank-you for taking the trouble to make that, but I respectfully decline.”

One of them sent him an image of eight tall, black trees standing in the middle of an empty plain. This meant something like: _it is for_ _when we are alone._

Hux sighed, ate another spoonful of the gruel without thinking. “Why? What does the mask add to anything?”

 _face_ , said bell-tolling-over-a-desolate-landscape, offering the helmet to him with a push of their hands.

“Do I not have one already?”

A double-strobe of _no_. One of the knights sent him an image of a pink and orange blur.

“Charming.” Hux set the bowl aside on a nearby shelf and reached out to take the helmet, turning it in his hands, upending it to look at the space inside. He could feel the knights drawing back a little and moving to a position of poised attention. Hux looked up at them and back to the helmet. There could be no harm in just trying it on, he rationalized. Phasma and Ren wore helmets every day and seemed none the worse for it.

He brought the visor to the front and lifted the helmet above his head, then carefully lowered it into place, feeling it latch automatically. It was very quiet inside the mask and the view through the visor was shadowy and indistinct. How did any of them find their way around, or move without bumping into things? The answer was obvious, upon consideration: the Force. Possibly the helmets were designed to focus their attention on it by muting the other senses.

The knights stayed still for a long moment, admiring their work. Then hands reached out and grasped Hux by the elbows, tugging him upright and pulling him forward so quickly he almost stumbled. Arms wound around his waist, drawing him in, and he found himself jostled into place and pinned between the shoulders of the figures on his right and left. The knights then ducked their heads, tilting forwards until their masks met with a hard clack. They held the position, waiting for Hux to lean in and close the circle.

 _serve_ , said the knights, with their barrage of many images, and one, implacable demand.

Hux took a deep, shuddering breath, taking in the scent of plastic and hot metal. Slowly, he bowed his head. A single blink of light: _yes_.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] To the Pure](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7757236) by [Kess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kess/pseuds/Kess)




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